Question

Twilio + Microsoft Excel Capabilities

  • 31 October 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 86 views

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.


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2 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +14

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.

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

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!