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Trying to automate a specific email... help!

  • 25 February 2020
  • 6 replies
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Userlevel 3

Hello, I am trying to automate an email series I have to send out to a number of people and it takes FOREVER. Bear with me through the details...

I am the course scheduler for my department at a university. During the course scheduling period, I will send EACH teaching instructor their course load with some email text. The course load information can either come from an Excel spreadsheet with multiple rows dedicated to each class/lab/seminar etc, or from a PDF version with the same information broken down in a more paragraphical way.

I am looking for a workflow that will select the chunk of rows from the spreadsheet that belongs to each professor, and send that information in the body of an email to said professor.


Any suggestions?


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Best answer by AndrewJDavison_Luhhu 26 February 2020, 10:20

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6 replies

Userlevel 7
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Hi @matteberry

So, if you're able to switch to Google Sheets, then there is a search step that allows you to grab multiple rows of data:

Screen Shot 2020-02-26 at 10.18.54.pngAs for grabbing the data from PDFs, you'll want to look at apps like https://docparser.com/ which integrates with Zapier.


Userlevel 3

Hi @AndrewJDavison_Luhhu,

Yes, I figured that feature of google sheets would come into play. But then how do I specifically get the workflow to pull each row associated to a professor, and email it to them?


Userlevel 7
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@matteberry

Is there (or can there be) a column stating which professor each row belongs to? Then you could make that your search criteria.

This would mean a zap for each professor, though.


Userlevel 3

@AndrewJDavison_Luhhu

Yes there is a professor column. Theoretically I could also add a column with their emails.

-- so that is the problem. Would there be any way to do a multi-step zap that could limit the need to do a zap for every prof?


Userlevel 7
Badge +10

You might want to check out Integromat.

It's similar to Zapier, but in the case you can setup a single operation of a single automation scenario to retrieve all rows on a Google Sheet and iterate over all of them.

Combining that with a column of professor's email addresses and you should be able to do what you want.


Userlevel 3

@AndrewJDavison_Luhhu

Thank you! I will check that out!!