Can a smartsheet form autopopulate a PDF? Or can you push every row to a recreation of the form (in

ksteele

Hi,

We are using forms to gather group ideas for creative projects. After, we would like to take each form submission or row and populate to a formatted PDF that can be presented to the managers for approval. Is there a way to push a form submission to populate a PDF? Or link cells in smartsheet to a PDF? Or any other solution to creating a workflow that produces an individual, branded document for every row?

We thought about PDF'ing the emails when the form is submitted, but because we need check boxes, the email is not visually appealing, nor is it easy to understand.

Thanks!

Andrée Starå

Hi,

There are several different ways to do this. One of the easiest, in my opinion, is to use the integration with Google Doc (Smartsheet Merge)

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/1850128-smartsheet-merge-add-on-for-google-docs 

Would that work for you?

I hope this helps you!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

J. Craig Williams

Andrée is right - Smartsheet Merge is quite useful for single row solutions. Using the JOIN() function can get multiple rows too, but the result may need to be tweaked, which requires a second pass through the doc after the merge.

I use Merge is at least three of my workflows -- but I keep looking for alternatives because there is a still a (large to me) manual step. 

I like WebMerge (https://www.webmerge.me) but it is a bit pricey for my taste and needs.

If you already use a e-signature program, many can be leveraged for this use case. Everyone (nearly) knows DocuSign, but I prefer some of the others like Signable. 

You could also use Zapier (www.zapier.com) or another automation/integration tool. 

I hope that helps.

Craig

ksteele

Thank you! We don't want to spend any additional money, so the merge should do the case for now. But I definitely agree that there is still too many manual steps!

ksteele

Thanks! This should work for now. Is there any way that when a row gets added it will automatically merge to a google doc and append the final PDF and/or google doc to the row? If not, that would be an incredibly useful enhancement.

J. Craig Williams

Any automation requires additional cost.

Craig

Andrée Starå

Happy to help!

Yes, it's powerful, and you can set it up so that when you run the merge in Google Doc it can create all the different files from the rows and also save it to Google Drive, attach the Google Doc and PDF to the corresponding row.

How many documents do you think you would need to create every week?

ksteele

At this point, just a few but if we can make it simpler, we'd hope to make it a regular practice for all of these type projects

Andrée Starå

I would recommend starting with Smartsheet Merge to see if it would work and if you need something else I would look at the tools that Craig mentioned. (WebMerge, DocuSign, Zapier)

 

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