Integrating Google Sheets with Zapier will allow you to unlock a whole new array of automation possibilities for the data in your spreadsheets. This post will show you how to use Zapier with Google Sheets by walking through the 3 different options for importing data into Zapier using the Google Sheets app.
As this post will demonstrate, the Google Sheets app in Zapier is an easy way to import 500 rows or less into your Zap. If, however, you need to import more than 500 rows or more than 10MB then take a look at the Zapier Google Sheets Quick-Start Guide to see the different options available based on how many rows or how much data you need to import.
Without further ado let’s dive into the different options for importing rows into Zapier using the Google Sheets app.
Using Zapier with Google Sheets Walkthrough Video
Lookup Spreadsheet Row
Once you have selected the Google Sheets app and the “Lookup Spreadsheet Row” action you will then need to navigate to the “Set up action” section where you will specify the “Spreadsheet” and the “Worksheet” within that you want to search.
Next, you will choose a “Lookup Column” along with a “Lookup Value” to search for within this column. As shown in the image below this lookup value can be a variable obtained from a previous step in your zap so you can dynamically change the row that will be returned by this search.
If desired you can specify a “Supporting Lookup Column” and “Supporting Lookup Value” so that the Zap will only return rows for searches where the lookup values are both found in the same row. Additionally, the “Bottom-Up” field can be used to tell Zapier to search from the bottom of the sheet, which can save time if you are continually adding data to this sheet and know that Zapier should start searching from these newly added rows.
Finally, you can specify whether this retrieval action should be considered a success when it does not find a row matching the lookup criteria. If “False” is selected then subsequent steps will be skipped, whereas, if “True” is selected then the Zap will continue so that you can use your own filters and paths to control the flow of the Zap.
Alternatively, you can select the “Create Google Sheets Spreadsheet Row if it doesn’t exist yet?” checkbox and then populate the columns from your sheet with the desired value. This way this lookup action will always be successful and your zap will always continue.
Now that you know how to use Zapier with the “Lookup Spreadsheet Row” action in Google Sheets you can take a look at the Zapier Google Sheets Lookup Value post to see how you can use this action to pull in more than 10MB of data in at once from Google Sheets.
Lookup Spreadsheet Rows
The difference between the “Lookup Spreadsheet Rows” action and the “Get Many Spreadsheet Rows” action is that the “Lookup Spreadsheet Rows” action allows you to selectively bring in rows based on matching values in your lookup column.
As we will see later the “Get Many Spreadsheet Rows” action is a much more simple action where you only specify a range of rows and columns you want to bring in.
The “Set up action” section has the same parameters as the “Lookup Spreadsheet Row” action so you can use the section above to see how to fill out these parameters to find your desired rows. In this case, though, this action will search up to a maximum of 500 rows, and return any rows that match the lookup criteria. If you want an example of this then check out the “Get Line Items for Google Sheets” section of the Zapier Loop Through Line Items Example post.
Get Many Spreadsheet Rows
Contrary to the 2 previous actions, which use lookup values to find desired rows, the “Get Many Spreadsheet Rows” action uses a range of columns to pull in a maximum of 500 rows. Since there are typically column headers the “First Row” field is set to 2. While using this range is convenient for pulling in a lot of rows at once it does not have the ability to selectively pull in rows like the “Lookup Spreadsheet Row” or “Lookup Spreadsheet Rows” actions can.
Now to Use Zapier with Google Sheets!
Now that you know how to use Zapier with Google Sheets to pull in the data you need you are ready to put this data to work!
If you want an in-depth walk-through of how to use the “Looping by Zapier” action, mentioned previously, to iterate through your Google Sheets data then you can check out the Zapier Loop Through Line Items Example and the Zapier loop through array from Google sheets posts.
Alternatively, if you want an overview of all the looping options available in Zapier (including nested looping!) then take a look at the Zapier For Each Loop Quick-Start Guide.
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