How to pass objects/collections to Google Docs?

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1

Hi,
As exercise, I am searching a solution for small business to integrate WooCommerce-like online shop to Google Docs to create automatic invoices.
I tried Craft My PDF, PDF Generator API and Zoho Invoices. Those solution are great, but none is really simple and immediate as could Google Docs be.

Two of them are not free and the one, that is free, is a complete CRM, that need the shop owner to set up items on the dashboard for each product and variation that he/she sells.

Google Docs looks very interesting for it’s super user friendly, also there is no need for the owner to set up a ton of settings in order to start creating pdf.

The problem is the following: Google Docs uses tags as API fields, but adding an items table looks impossible as tags accept only simple fields.

How could we overcome this situation? Any idea?

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Hi @Giacomo_Lanzi

Have a look at InvoiceNinja.

Hosted: https://www.invoiceninja.com/
OpenSource/Selfhost: https://www.invoiceninja.org/
Make module: Invoice Ninja Integration | Workflow Automation | Make

Ciao,
Gijs

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Thank you for the suggestion, but this has the same problem as Zoho: it helps create a whole invoice environment, that is not what I was looking for.
I don’t need statistics, no need to set up clients or items to be inserted.
WooCommerce has already a lot in terms of statistics and customer managing.

Plus: it’s free only up to 20 clients, which is not ideal. Maybe the self hosted could be free (I didn’t look into that), but that defies the purpose of being “really simple” as I would like to be.

Again, this is not a real situation, but more of a challenge I gave myself: find a way to generate invoices for small e-shop owner, almost without technical set up.

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@Giacomo_Lanzi If you are not too demanding with the design of your invoice the easiest way to create an invoice with Google docs is using the module “Create document” and plug your HTML.

Creating dynamic tables with Google docs API is difficult. Google sheets is actually pretty good for that :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
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Yeah,
I suppose that is the only way to do it. Styling is a bit tricky, though.

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I thought you wanted something cheap and cheerful. Invoices are surprisingly complex documents. Google docs could do it but you’ll need quite a bit of data management. Honestly not sure it’s worth it.