Auto-Generate Excel sheet monthly and email it

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1

Every month I have to submit for a cell phone reimbursement.

I often forget until too late in the month and miss the deadline.

What is the best way of having something generate an excel sheet with the new month, export it to pdf, and email it to me so all I have to do is print the attachment at the beginning of the month?

Thanks for the help

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I would suggest Zapier is the best choice for this. However it will require one of their paid plans.

3

Just a few questions to try and get a better understanding of what it is you need to do, as I suspect there may be multiple options to reach the goal that don’t necessarily follow what you have set out.

  1. What do you mean by “generate with the new month”?
    a. Is there maybe just one cell in the spreadsheet that changes each time, or in the print header?
    b. Are there any calculations or values other than the month that would change on a monthly basis?
  2. Is it important that the final output is PDF for your printing?
  3. Is it important that the source for the printable PDF is Excel?
  4. Would generation of spreadsheets in batch in advance be a viable option?
  5. Must the file be e-mailed to you if you are ultimately going to print it?
  6. Is the final destination really a hard copy, or is the ultimate recipient set-up for dealing with soft copies?
  7. Do you have any local desktop automation options - e.g. a Mac/PC?
  8. Does this have to be a web service only solution?
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4

These are excellent questions, but I think I would add a slightly more general question:

Can you show us an example of what one of these would look like? Like, create something that looks like like it would look, even if the actual numbers themselves aren’t real. (That being said: the closer your example document is to the actual thing you need, the easier it will be for us to help.)

(Here let me pause to reiterate and affirm what @sylumer said: telling us what format the file really needs to be in for the end product will help show us what we can use. It it has to be an excel sheet, that’s one thing. If it has to be a PDF, that’s another. If it just has to be numbers in a table printed out on a piece of paper, that’s different.)

I presume that each month is different and you have to fill-in some values (presumably based on how much you used your cell phone for company business)?

Do you have that information in some form already, and just need to enter it into some kind of table?

Are you trying to do this on a 1) Mac, 2) an iOS device, or 3) either?

ps - in the meantime, if you have an iPhone, get Due and put a reminder on the 1st of every month that will remind you to do this and have it repeat until you do it… even if you aren’t automating it. Then check it off and it will remind you the following month. Due is super-useful for nagging yourself into doing things. If it reminds you to do this just once, it will basically pay for itself.

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5

If it has to be pdf, I’d do it with Zapier and GSuite Google Docs. But that may or may not be an option as Google Docs free with a google account and a GSuite account Google docs have different availability with Zapier. This is also paid solutions.

But a Zapier account can pay for itself many times over.

You might also consider Airtable using their blocks feature.

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