Once in a while, we encounter some very tricky zaps that you’re having a hard time completing. You do trial and error so many times that it took a lot of your precious time just to complete the zap.

Here are the 3 trickiest things I’ve ever done with Zapier:

  1. Send an email with an attachment to Zapier and Merge it into a PDF
  2. Add Password, Set Output Name, and Send E-book to Reader
  3. Extract a specific area in a PDF

1. Send an Email With an Attachment to Zapier and Merge it into a PDF

It’s really easy to just merge the content and attachment of an email into one PDF so that there’s no need to check and download the attachments one by one especially when there are multiple attachments.

It might be a bit tricky but it can be done using PDF.co and Zapier. The workflow is to first send the email with an attachment to Email by Zapier, convert the content of the email using PDF.co HTML to PDF converter, and lastly merge the converted PDF with the attachments of the email.

Check step-by-step tutorial

2. Add Password, Set Output Name, and Send E-book to Reader

If you’re an E-book writer and you have many readers that want to buy your E-book every time, it would be a hassle to send the E-book to your readers one by one. You also need to add a password to the E-book so that only those who really bought your E-book from you can read them. It would also be great to change the name of the E-book that you will send to your reader with their name. If this can be automated, won’t it be very helpful to you?

It sounds really tricky but PDF.co and Zapier can automate this process for you. First, upload the E-book to Google Drive and create a spreadsheet for a list of your readers. Then, create a trigger using Google Sheets so that whenever there’s a new row that will be added to your list of readers it will trigger the zap. Then, add a password to your E-book using PDF.co security. Lastly, create an action to automatically send the password-protected E-book to your reader’s Gmail.

Check this action

3. Extract a Specific Area in a PDF

Have you been in a situation where you only want to extract a text or a table in a specific area? Where it’s pointless to extract all the text on the page since you only want to extract texts or tables specifically.

This is also one of the trickiest zaps that I encountered but PDF.co and Zapier have a solution for this. First, you need to know the X and Y coordinates of the area that you want to extract. It’s also important to know the height and width of the rectangle of the area that you want to extract. You can use this free PDF viewer here to get the coordinates and the area of the rectangle. Now that you know the coordinates and area of the rectangle that you want to extract, you may now use those coordinates and the area of the rectangle as a profile for your PDF.co action.

Check this tutorial