How to Generate PDF Certificates at Scale with Bannerbear and Airtable
Stop creating certificates one by one. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to automate the entire certificate generation process using Airtable and Bannerbear — so you can produce 10, 100, or 1,000 personalized PDFs in a single click.
Here's what we cover:
• Introduction
• Creating an Airtable Database
• Designing a Bannerbear Template
• Connecting Airtable with Bannerbear
• Generating & Saving Certificates
Whether you're running online courses, workshops, or training programs, this workflow will save you hours every time you need to issue certificates.
🔗 Resources:
• Bannerbear: https://www.bannerbear.com (https://www.bannerbear.com/)
• Airtable: https://www.airtable.com (https://www.airtable.com/)
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Video Transcription
[00:00:00] Picture this. You've got a hundred people finishing your course, or workshop, or training program, and now you need a hundred custom certificates with their names, dates, whatever, all formatted perfectly and saved as PDFs so they can easily be printed and distributed. You could do this manually, but you'd be there for days, or you could generate all one hundred in just one click.
Sounds impossible? Well, it's not. With Airtable and Bannerbear, you can automate the entire process. We're talking minutes of setup and then endless reuse. Your coffee won't even get cold. Let me show you how. Here's what's happening. Airtable stores all your data, names, dates, event details, and whatever goes on in that certificate.
Bannerbear then takes that data and turns it into a beautiful formatted image. Then it saves it back to Airtable as a link. It's a very
[00:01:00] simple pipeline. Now let's build it. Log into Airtable and create a new base, or open an existing one. You'll need a table with the information that belongs on your certificates, attendee names, event name, completion dates.
If you want to save your generated PDFs back to the table, and you do, add a URL field. Call this field whatever you want. Populate a few test records. Don't overthink it. Just enough data to see the magic happen later. Now your Airtable base is ready. Now we design. Every Bannerbear template becomes an API.
It takes your data and generates unique images from it. Text, images, shapes, colors, all dynamic and able to add dimension to your certificates. Log in to Bannerbear, create a new project, and give this a
[00:02:00] name. You can build this from scratch, but honestly, start with a template. It's much faster. Navigate to the Templates tab and search for certificates.
Choose one of these and add to your project Pick anyone that fits your vibe. Formal, playful, whatever. You can customize this after. Navigate to Editor, make some small modifications, tweak it, make it your own. Then hit Save Template. You can always come back and change this later. That's the beauty of this system, it's always adaptable to your needs.
This is the technical bit, but it's quite straightforward. You have all the pieces, and now we connect the dots. Banner Bear needs your permission to read your Airtable data and write the generated links back. For that, you're going to need a personal access token. Go to your Airtable account settings and generate a personal access token.
[00:03:00]
Make sure this has data records read and data records write permissions. Generate your token with the necessary permissions. Copy that token and keep it somewhere safe, because you'll need it. Go to your Banner Bear account settings, find the Airtable personal access token field, paste it, and save We're close to the payoff.
This is where it happens. This is where we tell Bannerbear which data goes where on your template. Then one click generates your entire batch. Easy. From your template page, go to integrations and click the Airtable settings button. You will need two things: your base ID and table name. Your base ID is on Airtable's API reference page.
Find your base,
[00:04:00] click it, copy the ID from the intro section, paste it into Bannerbear along with your table and view names, then click save and connect. Now you will see a mapping screen. Connect each Airtable field to the corresponding template layer. Only map what you need and ignore the rest. Then map the generated certificate back to that URL field you created in Airtable.
Click save, then import. Now watch it all happen. Scroll to see generated certificates. Your certificates will appear at the bottom of the page. Switch back to Airtable. Those links are now in your table. Beautiful, right? That's your certificate generated perfectly and ready to send. And
[00:05:00] there you have it.
With one template and a simple setup process, you've got infinite certificates. The next time you need to generate a batch, whether it's ten certificates or a thousand, you just hit import. Your data updates, your certificates regenerate, and your template stays the exact same. Want to run this for a different event?
Different base, same system. It just works. That's what this is really about. Time back in your day and one less thing to worry about.
