I’m working with a database in Airtable that contains information about laboratory specimens that require analysis. I want to take certain records from my base and turn them into a nicely formatted PDF document instead of just downloading a basic spreadsheet file. The goal is to have something that looks professional and clean for sharing with my team. I’ve been looking around but can’t find a built-in way to do this in Airtable itself. Does anyone know if there are any add-ons or third-party tools that can handle this type of conversion? I’m also open to alternative methods if direct export isn’t possible. Any help would be really appreciated!
zapier’s got some solid pdf generators that play nice with airtable. i’ve used documentero - super straightforward. just build your template, map the fields, and you’re done. takes about 30 minutes to set up, then it runs itself. way cheaper than paying a developer.
Been there with specimen tracking at my last company. Airtable’s basic exports look terrible.
We used Airtable’s API to push data into a PDF generator. Set up triggers when record status changed.
Build reusable templates that match your lab’s branding - consistent headers, proper spacing, charts if needed.
Start simple with one specimen type. Get that workflow working, then expand to other categories.
Watch out for special characters in your Airtable fields. Chemical symbols got mangled during our conversions.
Once it’s running, you’ll save hours. No more copy-pasting into documents.
You can definitely automate this without expensive add-ons or complex coding. I’ve solved this exact problem when my team needed to convert test data into professional reports.
Use an automation platform that pulls data from Airtable, formats it properly, and generates clean PDFs. I set up a workflow that triggers whenever we mark a record as “ready for report.”
Here’s how it works:
- Connect to your Airtable base and pull the records you need
- Use a PDF service to create templates with your branding
- Map your Airtable fields to template placeholders
- Generate and save the PDF wherever you want (Google Drive, email, etc.)
We went from manually copying data into Word docs to having professional PDFs generated instantly. Runs completely hands-off once it’s set up.
Latenode handles all these integrations smoothly and you can build the workflow with their visual interface. No coding required and way more flexible than Airtable’s basic exports.