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Can Zapier do this?

  • 17 July 2020
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  • Anonymous
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First, I am not a tech person so I have no idea if this is even possible.

I work for a nonprofit that has grown over the last couple of years. We find ourselves not always knowing where everyone is at and if we have coverage in the office. We are a 24 hour crisis center so things get a bit crazy.

We recently started using Gsuite to help better coordinate us. What I envision is that every Gsuite user would put their appointments into their Google calendar which would then pull that information over to a Google sheet.

Something like this...

We’ve tried using just the google calendars and turning them on and off but it just ends up looking a mess and is confusing.

Yellow represents their regular working hours and grey are any appointments they have scheduled.

I have looked for a program or software that could do this with no luck.

I don’t know if I’m asking for the impossible but it would greatly help us to have this quick overview of where and what everyone is doing. 

Any thoughts or ideas are greatly appreciated as I’m at my wits end trying to figure out this issue.

Thanks!

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Best answer by PaulKortman 17 July 2020, 01:00

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Hi @beaconsd and no worries about not being technical, you’re way more technical than you give yourself credit for! You added a screenshot to a forum post!!!! That counts for more than something :grinning:

 

So the technical answer is yes Zapier can accomplish what you are looking for, however, there are come caviats or “gotchas.” I’ll explain them below:

 

Authenticating/Permission

In order for zapier to pull in people’s caledar information (apointments and free time etc) you would need each user to login to Zapier and authenticate their calendar OR they would need to give a single google account admin access to their calendar. 

 

Changes to events

When a calendar event changes it can be difficult to find that event on the google sheet, for example if the event started at 10:30 and went to 11:30 which column in your screenshot would it be under? E or F or both?

 

And then there’s all kinds of other difficult situations about syncing as well as your screenshot only showed one day do you have a different sheet for each day? Do all days need to be up to date, or only today, or for the next 3 weeks?

 

Let’s just say it gets complex and there is a lot of room for errors and issues.  If you can find an app or solution dedicated to this function you and your team might be happier than dealing with all the possible issues that could come up within this possible solution.

 

I have worked with a client who uses Deputy for employee/team scheduling and they are quite happy with it. So I’d recommend looking into that. Or alternatives, if you take Google Calendar out of your searches and instead look for team scheduling or employee scheduling app you might find some decent alternatives that also do sync with an employee’s calendar.