Angus owns a beautiful apartment near the university campus. With the new semester around the corner, he wants to create brochures to attract students as tenants.
But here’s the challenge: the university has students from all over the world who speak different languages. Angus needs to create brochures that speak to everyone—from students from Japan to those from France, and everywhere in between.
While he could create PDF brochures in multiple languages manually, that process would be both time-consuming and error-prone. This guide explains how you can automate it all with the help of Google Sheets, Google Slides and the Document Studio add-on.
Here’s a sample PDF brochure in multiple languages generated using this approach.
Step 1: Create Google Slides Template
We’ll use Google Slides to create a brochure template like the one below.
The markers like {{ Title }} or {{ Line 1 }} are placeholders that will be replaced with the translated text from the Google Sheet. The {{ Embed QRCODE }} is a special marker that will be replaced with a QR code image that on scanning will take the user to the apartment’s location on Google Maps.
Step 2: Add data to Google Sheet
Next, we’ll create a Google Sheet where each row represents a different language version of your brochure. The first column contains the language code (like fr for French or es for Spanish), while the remaining columns hold the translated content that will populate your Slides template.
We are using the built-in GOOGLETRANSLATE function to automatically translate the text from English to the other languages. Thus, when you edit the text in the source language row, the other rows will be automatically updated with the translated text.
=GOOGLETRANSLATE(B$2,$A$2,$A3)
Step 3: Configure Document Studio Workflow
Now that we have the Google Slides template and the Google Sheet with the data, we can use Document Studio to generate the PDF brochures in multiple languages.
Inside the Google Sheet, go to the Extensions menu and launch Document Studio.
Give your workflow a name, select the Google Sheet that contains your translated language pairs. From the tasks panel, select the Append task - this will add the slides for each language one after another into a single presentation, making it perfect for printing.
If you would like to generate separate PDF files for each language, use the
Create Filetask but we’ll go with Append as that will make it easier to send the PDF to the printer.
Next, select the Google Slides template that we created in the previous step. Run the workflow and you’ll have a new file in your Google Drive containing the multilingual brochure.
With just a single Google Slides template and a Google Sheet, Document Studio makes it easy to generate multilingual brochures at scale. Whether you’re building real estate flyers, school notices, or marketing materials to target international audience, this approach dramatically reduces translation effort and eliminates manual formatting - letting you deliver accurate, print-ready documents in minutes.
