Can I save a record as a PDF?

Yes. Open the record and press PDF, next to Edit and Delete. You get a document with the record's title and its fields in the order your form puts them, named after the record. Anyone who can read the record can do it.

Can I print a record straight from the browser?

Yes. Ctrl-P leaves out the sidebar, the search box and the buttons, and keeps the view's name at the top. The PDF button is the tidier result if you want a file to send.

Can I print a whole list rather than one record?

Yes. Press Print on any list and you get a PDF of exactly what is on screen — the same columns, filtered and sorted the way you left it. It is a list rather than a report: no sections and no layout to design, and a grouped view prints flat. If the screen shows totals, the last line of the PDF shows them too.

Does the PDF show every field?

It shows the fields that have something in them, using your form's labels and your form's order. Empty fields are left out, and fields marked hidden are never printed.

Does it work in the installed desktop app?

Yes. In the installed desktop app the same button saves the file to your Downloads folder and tells you it did.

← Bionic Forms

Can I print a record or save it as a PDF?

A buying question, answered from the code rather than from the brochure · 20 September 2026

Two answers. Saving a record as a PDF: yes, one button. Printing straight from the browser: not tidily, not yet. The honest route is to save the PDF and print that.

The PDF

Open a record and press PDF, beside Edit and Delete. You get a document with the record’s title at the top and its fields underneath, in your form’s own order and with your form’s own labels — not a dump of database column names in alphabetical order. The file is named after the record, so a folder of them is readable.

Fields that are empty are left out, because a printed page full of blank labels is noise. Fields marked hidden are never printed: hidden means hidden from everyone on the screen, and a printed page travels further than a screen does. Anyone who can read the record can save it; the permission is exactly the same one.

And a whole list

Press Print on any list and you get a PDF of exactly what is on screen: your columns, filtered and sorted the way you left them. That is the members sheet, the attendance sheet, the stock count somebody carries round the shelves. It arrived on 21 September 2026, after somebody moving off Access told us it was the thing they would miss.

It is a list, not a report: no sections and no layout to design. A grouped view prints flat. If the screen shows totals, the last line of the PDF shows them too.

Mailing labels

The same bar has a Print labels button. It prints the records the view is showing as a sheet of mailing labels: Avery 5160 on US Letter, 30 to a page, or L7160 on A4, 21 to a page. Filter first, so “members in Ohio” or “customers who ordered this year” is the sheet you get.

A label carries the name, any company, and the address. Email addresses and phone numbers are left off, because they do not belong on an envelope. There is no label designer: if you need a different sheet or layout, download the list as a CSV and use a mail merge.

Ctrl-P and the desktop app

Ctrl-P now works too, as of 21 September 2026. Printing the page in your browser drops the sidebar, the search box and the buttons, keeps the view’s name and count at the top, and lets a long list run onto a second page with its column headings repeated. The Filter and Group row is kept on purpose — a printed list that quietly left out “Group: Country” would be a different document. The PDF button is still the tidier result, and the one to use if you want a file to send.
The buttons are in the installed desktop app too. In the Mac, Windows and Linux apps, PDF and Print work the same way. The app saves the file to your Downloads folder and tells you it did.

If you want the PDF sent automatically

That already existed and is worth knowing about separately. An automation can generate a PDF and email it — “when an order is marked shipped, email the customer a PDF of it” — written as a sentence rather than configured. That runs on our server without anybody pressing anything. The button on the record page is the other half: the one a person reaches for when somebody asks for a copy now.

Where this came from, since it is unusual to admit

A support tool we use ran a set of questions a buyer actually asks past our own help desk, and this one came back unanswerable: we could not print a record and nothing on the site said so. It was the only one of the seven where the honest answer needed a change to the product rather than a change to the writing. So the button exists now, and this page exists to say exactly how far it goes.

Being straight about where we are: Bionic Forms is pre-launch. There is no iOS or Android app; the macOS, Windows and Linux desktop builds and the web app are what exist today, the Windows build is not code-signed yet so Windows warns the first time you run it, and we have no external customers to point at. Every claim on this page was checked against the running product before it was written, including the two limits above.

Try it in about a minute: open the live demo database — no account, no email. Open any record and press PDF. Or read how files attach to a record, whether you can undo a change someone else made, or who in your team can see which records.

If you are moving off Access or FileMaker and want to see your own setup working first: tell us what it does and we will build a working version and show you. No fee and no card.