n8n Workflow: Fill PDF Forms in Bulk from Google Sheets

Automatically fill PDF forms in bulk from Google Sheets—then upload results to Google Drive

This n8n workflow checks your Google Sheets hourly, fills a blank PDF form for each new row using PDFops, uploads the completed PDFs to Google Drive, and writes the Drive link (or an error) back to the sheet.

What this workflow does

• Runs hourly on a schedule to process new data.
• Reads rows from a configured Google Sheets worksheet and keeps only rows where the status cell is empty.
• Downloads a blank PDF template from the provided URL.
• Fills the PDF using PDFops by mapping your Google Sheets column headers (excluding row_number, status, and pdf_link) to PDF field names.
• Generates output filenames using the configured fileNameColumn.
• Uploads generated PDFs to a target folder in Google Drive.
• Updates the source row: writes done and the Google Drive pdf_link, or records an status error message if filling or upload fails.

Use cases

• Batch-generating completed application forms from spreadsheet submissions.
• Producing personalized PDFs for SaaS onboarding or document collection workflows.
• Creating back-office document outputs (e.g., contracts/forms) with traceable Drive links per record.

Technical details

• Schedule: hourly execution.
• Google Sheets: filters rows where status is empty; updates by row_number.
• PDFops: implemented via the n8n-nodes-pdfops community node (n8n-nodes-pdfops / PDFops API credential) to fill/optionally flatten PDFs.
• HTTP Request: downloads the blank PDF template from a reachable URL.
• Google Drive: uploads filled files to the configured folder and stores the resulting link in pdf_link.

Setup requirements

Ensure your sheet includes row_number, status, and pdf_link columns, and that PDF form field names match your Google Sheets headers. Provide fileNameColumn to control output filenames.