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What's up Zap crafters? Welcome to another installment of Formatter Features, where we highlight individual functions with our Formatter app. This week we're looking at the Line Itemizer, in more of an overview. Next week we'll dive in a bit deeper.

We've looked at the Text to Line Item feature already, and though you *can* use that in some cases, there are times when you need something a bit more robust. Enter the Line Itemizer!

This option can be found at:

Formatter by Zapier — Utilities — Line Itemizer (Create/Append/Prepend)

bb8b20403b55508d6ca74f67c8893aab.png

What It Looks Like

There are significantly more fields here than we saw with Text to Line-Item and Line-Item to Text:

 

d715b81e2f57d21ab254e19ed5800eef.png

 

But don't be intimidated! We're going to go through what all of it does :)

What It Can (and Can't) Do

Here are the 3 primary things that you can do:

1) Create new line items from comma-separated text/values

Here we have mapped fields and separated them with commas.

cda4e1a7a3c1c9ef649bd9dd374ca643.png

2) Append text (add to the end) to line item properties

You can do the same as above but append something to each line item property.

ec481e40a7ec883e8379cf9f13905e35.png

In addition to appending/prepending to the end of separately mapped fields, you can use an existing line item and add something else into it. Here I've returned multiple rows from Google Sheets (as line items) and I added that same freebie into the mix.

5b7ff0a1dde0ec49b49fb6cbb93c4da7.gif

3) Prepend text (add to the start) to line item properties

Similarly, you can prepend something, adding it before your other fields.

263b437c244607ec4b60d9cbc96ebb0c.png

4) Manually enter text into an additional line item

This may not be the best example of something you'd want to enter manually, but here you can see that an entire new property is added with text that I typed:

735964b399992e900e490101159f9325.png

Things you can not do with it:

  • If you're using existing line items you can't insert additional values into the middle of those in your line item. You would first have to use Line Item to Text, map the output of THAT step into Line Itemizer and insert your other values wherever you'd like.

 

Some Ways to Use It

Zapier recently published The Zapier guide to line items, which you might want to check out if you're unsure about line items.

1. Add line items to existing data

This would be something like the example above, where I added a freebie into my line items. It wasn't in my existing data but I added it to the others.

2. Create line items from scratch, to use in later steps

In this article, I give an example of when you might want to create line items that you can use in a later step (like QuickBooks, for example).

3. Add another line item property

As shown above, where I added a shipping property, you can add new properties that will be added to each of your line items. Some possible examples:

  • Shipping

  • Tax

  • Discount

Anything Tricky About It?

The trickiest part of the Line Itemizer is wrapping your head around what you're ultimately trying to accomplish, which format your data is currently in, and then what you have to add in order to get your desired result. It may require some experimentation, but if you ever get stuck that's where the Zapier Community and Support team come in handy :)

That’s a Wrap (for now at least)

Well, we’ve been through a lot of Formatter Features in the past few months! For now, it looks like we’ll be wrapping up this series. Hopefully you’ve found some of these helpful! As always, if you have any questions please let us know!

What happens if not all of the data has a comma but the information should be the same? For example, I am exporting data from a quickbooks invoice. The Name of the customer and the Invoice number are the same, but the rest of the data is not. When it exports, it creates multiple line items, but only puts the name and invoice number 1 time and not down the list. I tried using the data from quickbooks (as opposed to the formatter) on the google spreadsheet part of the zap, but still not working quite right.

Hi @ihitprint!

Are you able to share a screenshot (without personally identifiable information) that could help demonstrate what you’re trying to accomplish, and how you’ve set it up?

That would be super help — thanks!

@nicksimard adding on to @ihitprint’s comment, I’m having the same issue where there are commas within the text I’m trying to itemize.

Here’s an example after running the Line Itemizer:

The last item on the first list should actually be "value: e personal, e personal2". Zapier sees that comma and thinks it is its own line altogether.

 

Any workaround once it’s in this state?

Thanks

@RH_Z and others.  I was able to work around the issue of having commas in the string.

I used the Zapier Formatter > Text > Replace tool and replaced all “commaospace]” with “::” for the specific string.  I then used the output of that to set up my line itemizer.

 

 

Is there a way to reverse the order of the out, e.g. the first output becomes the last and the last becomes the first? 

const list = inputData.list;
// Reverses the order of the items in the list array
list.reverse();
output = { list };

 

You can use Code by Zapier > Javascript to achieve this.

provide inputdata called “list”.

 

Thank you!

const list = inputData.list;
// Reverses the order of the items in the list array
list.reverse();
output = { list };

 

You can use Code by Zapier > Javascript to achieve this.

provide inputdata called “list”.

 

There are separate items in the output, e.g. in each output I have 10 fields, name, email, phone etc. Is it possible to do this and reverse them please?

 

E.g.

Output 1:

1: Name

2: email

3: phone

Output 2:

1: Name

2: email

3: phone

 

I just need to reverse the output 1 and output 2, rather than the items in each output.

I tried this script, and put input data fields as name, email, phone, but I get an error saying SyntaxError: Identifier 'inputData' has already been declared

 

Thanks!!  

Reply


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