In another thread some months ago, the problem of generating reports out of Baserow data was discussed. A couple of high (or at least medium-high) tech solutions were suggested. But there is also a low (or at least OLD) tech approach that works just fine: copy and paste.
- Create a grid view in Baserow that filters to show just the records and fields that you want
- Create a “template” — a pre-formatted shell document — in the platform you want to use for your pdf output.
- Select all the records in the Baserow report view, copy, and paste into your shell document
- Save-as or print-to PDF
This is how I create invoices. I’m using Airtable but hope to switch to Baserow as soon as possible. Both Airtable and Baserow allow me to select a range of records and columns, just like copying a range in a spreadsheet. (NOTE: This something I cannot do in many other database platforms, like FileMaker.)
For my PDF output template, I use Google Sheets but of course this could be done with Excel, Word, whatever. If you’re doing a mail merge, you can create your Word + Excel merge document pair, and simply paste the data into the Excel file when you need to do a new report.
If I had a ton of reports to run out of Airtable (or Baserow) I would definitely look into automating the process. But every integration introduces a new potential point of failure in your system.
(Basically same answer I gave in that other thread but @OlgaTrykush suggested I repost it here.)
