Let's say you have a PDF stored in Airtable and you want to email it to someone automatically.
Maybe it is an invoice, a report, or a document you generated from the data in your base.
You can send the PDF as an actual attachment using Airtable's Send email automation action. The setup is pretty simple if the PDF is already on the record that triggers the automation.
It gets slightly more complicated when the file is stored somewhere else.
If the PDF is in the same record
This is the setup I prefer whenever possible.
Let's say you have an Invoices table. The record contains the customer's email address and an attachment field called Invoice PDF.
Create your automation and add a Send email action.
Fill in the recipient, subject, and message as you normally would. Then scroll down to the Attachments section.
Click the plus button and select your Invoice PDF attachment field.
That's it.
When the automation runs, Airtable takes the file from that field and sends it as an attachment with the email.
If you control where the PDF is stored, I prefer keeping it on the same record that will eventually trigger the email. It keeps the automation simple and saves you from having to look up the file somewhere else.
Of course, that is not always how a base is structured.
If the PDF is in a different record
Let's say your automation is triggered from the Clients table, but the PDF you need to send is stored in a related Reports table.
You cannot select the attachment directly from the triggering record because it isn't there.
In this situation, I would add a Find records action before the email.
Use it to find the record that contains the PDF. If your tables are linked, you can use that relationship to find the correct record. You could also use another unique value if that makes more sense for your setup.
Once you have found the record, go back to the Send email action and add the PDF field from the Find records step to the Attachments section.
Airtable will give you options for how to use the values returned by Find records. Choose Flatten.
That gives the email action the attachment value it needs, and the PDF will be sent with the email even though it lives in another record.
One thing I would check here is whether your Find records step can return more than one record. If you only want to send one PDF, make sure your conditions are specific enough to find the correct record rather than every related record.
What if you need to create the PDF first?
Sometimes the PDF does not exist yet.
You might have commission data, an invoice, a quote, or some other information in Airtable that needs to be turned into a PDF before you can send it.
For this, I normally use a document generation tool.
If the data already exists in Airtable, I prefer using Make or n8n together with something like DocuMint or DocsAutomator.
The document generator creates the PDF, and Make or n8n attaches it back to the correct Airtable record.
If the data is coming through a form, I would look at Fillout first. It can generate a PDF from the form submission and send both the form data and the generated document to Airtable.
Once the PDF is sitting in an attachment field, the email part is the same. Add that attachment field to the Attachments section of your Send email action and Airtable can send it for you.
I have a separate article on how to create PDFs from Airtable records and attach them back automatically if you want to automate that part as well.