Docugen - Almost but not quite

Looking for instant document creation in MDC? Docugen could work for you but I’ve spent 3 straight days trying to get it to work and here’s what I’ve learned

  • It integrates amazingly well, with the click of a button I can have a PDF added to the column of my choice, beautiful; that’s wonderful and pretty quick.

  • It’s reasonably priced. Good value for the job performed.

  • Your template must be in Word format. Which doesn’t seem too scary on the exterior until you learn that docugen doesnt work well with text boxes and shapes. I find MS Word to be ver unfriendly but to use docugen you must master tables, alignment and give up on a bigger vision

  • Date formatting. You want to create a contract, proposal, invoice whatever and want to include a standard date format? Well throw away the handy MDC “format_dates” formula and instead take 3 hours out of your day to research workarounds. I ended by using an MS Word date function instead

  • Want to insert the email & phone number of the person listed for this line item? Well try to use the easy built-in function from MDC ({Column#Emails} or {Column#Names} for an hour only to realize docugen wont display it on the document. Instead break out your excel formula skills to write a long nested IF statement. Congrats, you’ve now created a headache of a cell to maintain just to use Docugen.

  • Pictures. This is where I lost it. Docugen cannot put a picture over 500K in a document. So now all pictures must go through a separate software process to limit file size. Someone on your team forget to do this? Well now you have a document that went to the customer with ‘filename.jpg’ in lieu of the photo :slight_smile:

  • More Pictures. Image size, scaling, cropping. There’s no thought to this. I can’t get an image to appear it’s actual size, it’s somehow limiting to be about 200px wide. Spent half a day and all of my evening trying different methods to get an image to display properly, no luck. I give up.

Maybe I’ll try Eledo , but it seems under-developed. Pandadoc is $60 per seat. All other solutions integrate with salesforce and hubspot.

Hey @frankp thank you very much for the review! Sami here, DocuGen founder.
You summed up very well the key issues we are working hard to fix: easier date formatting, support for hash-tags in formulas, and better handling of images. What I can promise you is that these are some of our top priorities. We want to make sure DocuGen continues to be the easiest to use without sacrificing functionality.
FYI you might want to reach out to our amazing support team for workarounds to your issues: you can reach them at support@docugen.io or through the live chat in-app.

Hi @frankp – did you know we just launched the new DocuGen Community website? You can contribute ideas, vote for feature requests, and ask the community how-to questions.

Your ideas are already part of the community - go ahead and add your vote so that we prioritize them in our next release:

Better support for text boxes and shapes:

Date formatting:

Image size:

Thank you so much for writing down your experience. Saved me a lot of time in trial and error! I am trying to find something that would be close to a pdf filler document that could be filled from Monday.com and we could continue inputting information in later on as well.

Hey!
for all of you who struggle with image size,
I have developed simple automation which decreases immediately the size of the image after uploading it on Monday.
you can directly reach me here or by email I’ll give you more info
shelyeldman@gmail.com

Shelly

1 Like

@ShellyEldman this is fantastic! Can you share your automation here? I also dropped you a word by email if you prefer…

here is a demo of the automation

2 Likes

Love it! Is Pretzel your own app?
@Neda

Hi @samicaracand! Any updates in DocuGen from this last post. I am revisiting the program for our company. My main issue is not being able to create templates from PDF’s in Monday.com
Not sure if there is a workaround for this?

Hi @frankp,

you can use the DocExport app which would overcome most of your difficulties:

  • It works with Text boxes and shapes
  • It has easy date, time and number formatting using commonly known syntax, e.g. {{DateColumn | dd.MM.yyyy}}, see Custom date and time format strings - .NET | Microsoft Learn
  • Works with subfields, e.g. {{Column#Emails}}, {{Column#Names}}
    You can also combine subfields with formatting, e.g. {{Time Tracking#Hours | N0}}
  • Pictures/Images in columns can be inserted into a PDF file. You can specify the desired size in the pdf and the image is automatically compressed to keep the size of the pdf reasonable.
    As an example {{Image(100;0):Item.NameOfFileColumn}} outputs the image in NameOfFileColumn with a width of 100 points and the height is adjusted automatically using the aspect ratio of the image.

DocExport can also work with formulas, mirror-columns, QR-Codes and Charts. It’s also GDPR compliant.