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I’m new to Zapier and trying to build an automation that allows for filtering a spreadsheet (Excel or Google Sheets) daily and then sending each individual row a customized text reminder via Twilio. 

 

I understand that there is connections to Google Sheets, Excel, and Twilio via Zapier (referenced this article) - which is great! I’m struggling to understand what the capabilities are beyond triggering an SMS message for a specific event (new row, new worksheet, etc). I really need to interact with an entire spreadsheet following the below steps:

  1. Scheduled trigger via Schedule by Zapier to run daily
  2. Get dates + format dates to identify if Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc when the automation runs
  3. Apply filter to Google Sheets for a column “Day” to dynamically identify if Monday and only return records listed for Monday.
  4. Using a loop/batch type function to treat each individual row as unique and push to Twilio to send a dynamic message to each row.

It looks like there are limitations for “lookups” in Excel/Google Sheets to 20 rows. I don’t see any filter options to apply to an entire spreadsheet of about 300 rows. I thought about using Formatter Utilities to import a CSV into my Zap and then using Code by Zapier to apply the filters to the CSV with Javascript but this file can’t be on a public URL since it includes PII. 

 

Lots of information there but hoping someone can help with my use case! My main roadblock is interacting with a file of data/applying filters/running subactions for each row.

You might be better off exploring an SMS app like TextMagic or ClickSend that has lists and can have messages scheduled, plus these apps integrate with Zapier.


Hey @meghan happy to help here! I think there are two options to try here.

  1. Troy’s suggestion of moving to another SMS service that offers more user-friendly/robust scheduling capability.
  2. Use Airtable to host your data. You can then set up filtered views and set up a condition where a record is to only appear when the date in the “date” column = “today”. In Zapier, you can set up a Zap to trigger off of a “New Record in View”.

Hope that helps to get you pointed in the right direction!