Airtable Catalog Merge
Create catalogs using the Airtable Base Art Gallery
With this Ultradox automation you can automate the creation of your catalog.
Ultradox uses the data from the Art Gallery example base, that provides all relevant data to create a nice catalogue in PDF format.
Configuration
After copying the example to your Google Drive (My Drive), you will find the following files and folders in the Airtable Catalog Merge project folder:
The Ultradox Automation Airtable Catalog Merge, the Google Docs template Airtable Catalog Template and the Catalogs folder.
Art Gallery
As this example uses the data from the Art Gallery example, please copy the following template base into your Airtable account:
You can then generate the catalog using the sample data or populate the base with your own data.
Ultradox Automation
Open the Ultradox Automation Airtable Catalog Merge.
This automation will load the data from Airtable using the the List records building block and passes it to the Generate PDF building block to generate and finally save the catalog into the Catalogs folder on your Google Drive.
If you have never connected Ultradox to your Airtable account you will have to grant access to your Airtable account by clicking on the key icon in the first building block.
You will then get prompted to enter your API key. Copy and paste the Airtable API key into the text field to grant access to your Airtable account.
After you have successfully connected your Airtable account, you can then select the base and table to be loaded.
Click on not selected in the first building block to open the Airtable picker dialog and pick Artists from the Art Gallery base.
Google Docs Template
Open the Google Docs template Airtable Catalog Template. This template only consists of two pages:
The first page is the title page of the catalog, the second page contains the template from which the individual catalog pages are generated.
Adjust the title page to your likings, it is just an ordinary Google document.
On the second page you will find variables and instructions to generate a sections for each record in your airtable base.
You can change the font, font size and font color of the variables to adjust the layout of the generated sections.
The instructions and variables in the template tell Ultradox to generate a sections in the catalog for each record in the Airtable base. Do not mess up the instructions or variables!
Familiarize yourself with working with variables if you want to add more placeholders, conditions, or loops to your contract.
Now you can design the Google Docs template Airtable Catalog Template and check your result in the preview.
Preview
Open the Ultradox Automation Airtable Catalog Merge to create a preview of your catalog.
To do this, select the Generate PDF building block in the automation and click on the Preview button located at the top right of the block. Ultradox will then generate a preview in a new browser window.
The preview will only work if your catalog can be generated within 60 seconds. If your catalog is getting larger and takes longer than 60 seconds, the preview is not available and you will have to run the automation instead.
If you are satisfied with the result, you are ready to generate your catalog.
Run
Open the Ultradox Automation Airtable Catalog Merge and click on the Run button in the Automation menu bar. Ultradox then creates a PDF document of your catalog and archives the document in the folder Catalogs.
That's it! You have successfully automated the creation of your catalogs.
Questions and Feedback
If you have any comments on this page, feel free to add suggestions right to the Google document that we are using to create this site.
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Last Updated: 15.01.19