Is it possible to create a new Google text doc with a button?

1

I have a couple of text fields in a table – “Text Title” and “Text Body”.

I’d like to create a brand new Google Doc with the title “Text Title” and the body “Text Body” – and return the Google Doc URL to put into a field called “Link to Google Doc.”

Is this possible?

Once a Google Doc has been created, and I change the “Body Text”, can I have a button that will update the existing Google Doc with the new text?

I currently use Filemaker to create report exports into Word and PDF files – doing something similar with Coda into Google Docs would be very nice.

Thanks!

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I haven’t tested, but this is something I would expect you to be able to achieve with Zapier. For example, the following Zap could have Sheets changed to Coda and work in the same way: https://zapier.com/apps/google-docs/integrations/google-sheets/2786/create-new-google-docs-text-files-from-new-rows-in-google-sheets

You’d need to setup the button to create a New Row on a separate table, copying the relevant column details, and then use the relevant trigger in Zapier.

Alternatively, you could use a webhook with Zapier and have the button push to the necessary URL, though right now that will mean launching a new window (not ideal).

3

That’s too bad. I’m trying to avoid using Zapier, and keep everything in one platform. (Otherwise, things keep breaking, and once they do, I have a really hard time figuring where the breakdown happens because it could be in so many different places. I’ve already hit this problem with pushing out RSS feeds, since I’m using three different services to send them to different platforms, and it’s turning into a giant mess.)

I was hoping since Coda has other Google integrations that they might have this one as well – or are working on building one, or something similar.

Best,
Maria

4

There’s a URL you can use to create a new Google Doc with a particular title:

https://docs.google.com/document/create?title=YOUR_TITLE

If there was a way to automatically copy text to the clipboard, a user could just click a Coda button to create a new doc, with the title pulled from another field, and the user would just have to hit paste once inside the Google Doc to fill in the text. Then the user would have to copy-and-paste the Google Doc URL back into the Coda database, to save the link of the Google Doc for later.

But I don’t see a copy to clipboard function anywhere. So you’d have to do that manually, too.

Another alternative could be to generate an export file. I’d love to have Word or PDF exports (for documents, invoices, etc…)

Best,
Maria

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5

Copy to clipboard has been suggested but no response:

Otherwise I don’t think there is a way currently to do that, though you might be able to launch a View that was just the relevant text/cell. Sorry, really not sure at this point, but great find with the autogeneration of Google docs, that’s pretty neat :slight_smile:

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Were you able to figure out a way to automate this? I’m trying to set up a template to build three separate google docs for new projects that my team works on.

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