How to create PDF files with Appsheet

Let’s face it: with more data comes more reports. And if you or your team have to manually create a report every time you get new data, well, that’s a recipe for burnout! In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to automate the process of creating PDF files using Appsheet — saving you tons of time. Plus, I’ll show you how to customize these PDFs to fit your exact needs, so you can have professional, polished reports ready at the click of a button.

Before we get started automating pdf files we first need to have an app so let’s create one.

Sign-in to Appsheet and go to: https://www.appsheet.com/home/apps

1. Click “+Create”
2. Select “App”
3. Select “Start with existing data”
4. Choose the name of your app and the category

In my case I’ve created one with Google Sheets, with a Sheet called PDF Creation App with the following column headers:

• UID – This will be a unique ID
• Photo – As the name implies this will be an Image
• Name – The name of our sample data user
• Birthdate – Birthdate of our sample data user
• Location – Location of our sample data user
• Position – Position of our sample data user

That’s it, our app is created and ready to start.

Now that we have our app ready with all the fields we need, we can head on over to the Automation screen. (Represented by the Robot icon on the left navbar)

We will be greeted by screen with the promp: “Create my first automation”, you should click it and then click “Create a new bot”.

This is the bot view, here you can create your bots and tell them what to do, in our case, we created a bot that works with the only table we have that is called “User Data”(change this to fit your needs). In here we selected that this bot should work for Adds, Deletes and Updates, this means that for all changes to our data the bot will be awaken and do what it is instructed to do. Let’s say you only wanted this bot to work when new data is created, you would de-select the other options, leaving only Adds selected.

Now we need to create a Step! Consider Steps like individual instrutions for the event we just created, so in case of Adds, Deletes or Updates do the specified Step!

To borrow from Newton: “for every action, there is a reaction”. Here, the “Action” is the Event (Add, Delete or Update), and the “Reaction” is our Step (such as sending an email, creating a new file, etc…)

In the Step Screen we have multiple options like:

• Send an email
• Send an SMS
• Call a script
• etc.

In our case we are interested in Create a new file, so that is what we should select. Here we can also change the Prefix of our document (comes standard as AppSheetDoc) and in our case we changed it to match our User’s [Name].

You can also select the File Folder Path, by default, Appsheet creates multiple folders within your Google Drive like such:

“appsheet/data/(YourAppName)/” – This is where your files will be placed but you are free to change it to fit your needs.

For documents where you dont need to know at what time it was created I also recomend disabling Timestamp

The next thing to do is under Template to click the “Create” button.

After all these steps don’t forget to click Save

When you click create, Appsheet will generate a Template Document for our PDF that you can see by clicking View.

For our case this was the document it generated.

And that’s it! Now everytime new data is added to our app a new file will be created.

You can also costumize the template file, to match you company identity, place watermarks, elaborate tables and much more.

Example:

Congratulations! You now have a fully funtional PDF creation tool built right into you AppSheet app.

By following these steps, you’ve set up a PDF creation workflow using AppSheet Automation. This mean no more manual report generation and more time for you to focus on what really matters – Leveling Up!

Whether you are handling documents for clients, managing reports or just streamlining your processes, this tool is a game-changer for productivity.

Enjoy the freedom to get more done with less efort and keep Leveling Up!

If you want to learn more about AppSheet automation we recomend reading the official AppSheet documentation here.