April 18, 2024
Rupert Hoffschmidt-McDonnell
DocsAutomator v3 — Making document creation more flexible & powerful!
--I'm super excited to release DocsAutomator's newest version — DocsAutomator v3! It's packed with a ton of new features that make document creation more flexible & powerful and I'm sure it's going to take your document workflows to the next level!
There are two ways to learn all about it:
At the end of this post, you find detailed videos for using the beta from Glide and Airtable (these videos only focus on setting up document creation, not highlighting new features).
The beta lives under https://app-v3.docsautomator.co and is publicly available. You sign in with your DocsAutomator credentials and will see all your automations in the dashboard.
DocsAutomator's newest version is fully backwards compatible, meaning whatever has worked before will continue to work.
This newest version is released as a beta to not disrupt any existing workflows and give everyone enough time to test their document creation workflows with the newest version. I would love to get as much input and feedback on it as possible!
The plan is to keep the beta up and running for about 2 weeks. After those two weeks, the beta will become the main version.
Unfortunately ClickUp and Noloco are not supported to be tested in the beta phase of v3.
Triggering document creation via webhook is also not supported during the beta phase. There will be a chance for webhooks in the near future.
DocsAutomator v3 has a much improved document creation engine, which significantly reduces the creation time for large documents. While you won't see any big changes for smaller, less complex documents, documents with lots of pages, line items or images will be processed a lot faster.
DocsAutomator v3 makes document creation a lot more flexible! Please find all the new options below.
If no value is passed for a given placeholder, the placeholder will now be exactly removed from the document instead of adding a white space for the placeholder.
You now have the option, to select "line / row deletion" for placeholders when no value is passed. There are often cases, where a removed value leads to a blank space in documents. Think of a list of bullets, where one of the bullets / values does not exist. Enabling "line / row deletion", removes the entire line instead of only the placeholder itself. This works for line items as well. If "line / row deletion" is enabled on a line item placeholder, rows where values are empty will not be printed in the document.
Values can now be rendered conditionally depending on the existence or absence of values. This works in liaison with deleting lines / rows from above.
Text can now be conditionally styled according to any style option that Google Docs provides: background color, foreground color, row background color (line items only), font size, setting a text link, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, small caps and baseline offset.
You are now able to define the height for images in addition to width. Please note that the image will always scale according to the image aspect ratio.
Line items receive a BIG update with DocsAutomator v3!
The syntax for line items is simpler & more straightforward. Instead of having to use "line_items_" for every placeholder in a line items table, you declare a line item table once with {{line_items_1 / 2 / 3 / ...}}. For the rest of the placeholders, you don't have to use the "line_items_" suffix. As said before, the old syntax still works, but I highly recommend adopting the new syntax.
You can now mix static and dynamic content in line items and use multiple placeholders in a single cell. Content can also spread over multiple lines and will maintain that format in printed documents. Any applied style in the template is also maintained for printed items. See a complex example below:
Before, line item tables had to have two rows (header row + variable row). Now, you can start a line items row anywhere in an existing table. So you could have three header rows and only then start with your dynamic items, followed by a footer row. Example:
A typical layout for line item tables is alternating the background color for rows. This can be done conditionally by defining whether a given value is part of an even or odd row.
If no line items are passed at all, the entire line item row will now be deleted, allowing for very flexible documents. As an example: You could define all the possible mutations in the template and DocsAutomator will delete those that don't apply in your given scenario when you're printing a document. There will be more example for this in the near future.
DocsAutomator now has a preview mode for all data sources. No more wasting documents for testing!
You will notice a few changes about the frontend:
Happy automating!
Rupert
Founder & Automator in Chief