"Pretty" PDF export -- Google merge, something else?

amanda

Hi all,

We’re hoping to be able to export a fairly complicated styled PDF from Smartsheets. Imagine a sheet of movie reviews, where Column A is movie title, B is review, C is reviewer and D is date. Each movie can have multiple rows depending on how many reviews it’s received.

We’d like to get a PDF that would look a little like this:

Movie Title (column A:2)

“This movie was awesome!” (B:2)

- Siskel (C:2), May 18 2017 (D:2)

“This movie was the literal worst.” (B:3, where A:3==A:2) 

- Ebert (C:3), May 18 2017 (D:3)

 

In a dream world, we can use the PDF export on both Reports and Sheets.

I thought maybe Google merge would do it, but it sounds like Google merge only prints 1 row per page and can only work from Sheets.

Is there a different solution that I’m not seeing? Something close? If not, is it even within the realm of possibility? If it is, could one hire a developer to build an app to do this?

Thanks! 

Gwyneth C

Hi Amanda,

It sounds as if you've already explored the Google Docs Merge add-in and as you point out, it won't allow you to merge data from more than one row onto a single page.

Just in case you want more info and have not yet explored the Help Center... here's a bit more about the Smartsheet add-in. 

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

Smartsheet does have Consulting Services available that could help you build a more custom solution that leverages the Smartsheet API.

Here's a link to more information about that:

https://www.smartsheet.com/custom-consulting

Hope this helps!

-Gwyneth

 

 

 

J. Craig Williams

 I don't know if the movie review is an analogy or the actual use case.

1. Each change in movie title creates a new PDF or a new sheet in the same PDF or only one movie title is processed at a time?

2. Are all movie title reviews kept together by movie title or could row 1,2, and 5 be Movie A and 4,6, and 12 be Movie B?

3. Are there limits to the number of reviews per movie?

Some of those answers may allow Google Merge to be used, but I'd need to see the actual data to be sure.

I'd also consider exporting to Excel and trying to PDF the data from there.

Craig