Question

Google Calendar Digest for Next Week events

  • 5 January 2023
  • 5 replies
  • 242 views

Hi! I am essentially trying to recreate what Google Calendar for Teams in Slack has done for use previously; so sad it is now legacy. 

 

I would like to have a message that goes to a Slack channel each Friday showing the events on the team’s out of office calendar for the next week. I’m trying to use the Digest function in Zapier but I’m just not sure how to manipulate to get the right trigger. If I do time before “Event Start Time,” this would have to be 7 AND 6 and 5 and 4 and 3 days before the start date if I wanted to capture the entire week of events. How could I capture events that span a range of dates? Example, if the OOO time starts this Thursday and extends into next week, I’m not sure the “Event Start Time” trigger would capture that for the next week.


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5 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hi @amyfountain!

These types of workflows can be a little tricky, trying to get the exact timing right.

You almost want to create something like a Google Sheet where you track the dates of the OOO as well as column that can calculate either the starting date of that week, or the date you want to send it in Slack.

Essentially, you want to add and remove from a Google Sheet (via another Zap) then the main Zap would be:

Trigger: Schedule by Zapier (weekly on the day of the week you want)
Action: Google Sheets — Find Rows (you’ll want to have a column that you can match against things that appear in the trigger):
 

 

Then in Google Sheets you find a way to get a column that can contain the date the week starts (this may be complicated):

 

Then the final step of the Zap is to send the results in Slack. 

This is all easier said than done, but I wanted to first spell out what I was thinking to see what you think :)

Hi Nick,

Thank you for this! I think creating a zap to capture the events in a Google Sheet as they are created, then using the results of that Sheet to make this automation happen will work great -- I had not thought of this. I’m excited to test this out for our use case!​​​​​​

 

Hi @amyfountain!

These types of workflows can be a little tricky, trying to get the exact timing right.

You almost want to create something like a Google Sheet where you track the dates of the OOO as well as column that can calculate either the starting date of that week, or the date you want to send it in Slack.

Essentially, you want to add and remove from a Google Sheet (via another Zap) then the main Zap would be:

Trigger: Schedule by Zapier (weekly on the day of the week you want)
Action: Google Sheets — Find Rows (you’ll want to have a column that you can match against things that appear in the trigger):
 

 

Then in Google Sheets you find a way to get a column that can contain the date the week starts (this may be complicated):

 

Then the final step of the Zap is to send the results in Slack. 

This is all easier said than done, but I wanted to first spell out what I was thinking to see what you think :)

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +8

Hi @amyfountain ! Checking in to see if Nick’s fancy footwork did the trick here. Were you able to give it a whirl? Let us know when you’re able!

Hi @amyfountain ! Checking in to see if Nick’s fancy footwork did the trick here. Were you able to give it a whirl? Let us know when you’re able!

Hi Liz! Unfortunately, this didn’t quite work. This workaround says to look at the week the event is starting in, which doesn’t cover cases where a PTO events starts in the prior week -- for example, if someone took Thursday - Tuesday and just set it as one event. We would not see the Monday and Tuesday dates.

I’m working on a workaround with a few “if” statements, but as of now this project is on the back burner. So, I don’t quite have a best answer yet.

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Thanks for letting us know @amyfountain! If you do figure out a way to sort it using some IF statements to handle dates from the previous week please do let us know. I’m sure others in Community would benefit from your solution! 🙂