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Hoping a guru finds this a fun challenge.

We are taking bids from contractors for deck building. I’m posting jobs to contractors who have access to see these jobs and bid on them. I have a singular form on each job posting which auto pulls lots of data including the post title which has a job number, city, and state.

From there, I can get Zapier to recreate via Google Sheets template and name the Sheet exactly the job number, etc.

What I’m looking to do is make Zapier check to see if a spreadsheet already exists. The first form submission will create the Google Sheet and fill in the info but the second one will check to see if it exists, and if so just add that bid information and not create a new sheet document.

Here’s the rundown:

  • Contractor fills out the gravityform
  • GF autopopulates hidden fields and is readied for Zap
  • Zap creates the new Google Sheet and dynamically names based on Post name, fills bid into first row.
  • Another contractor fills out the gravityform for the same job.
  • Zapier checks and sees that the Sheet already exists - skips the creation of new sheet and instead, fills that bid data into 2nd row.
  • Rinse/repeat

My problem is that I can’t figure out how to tell Zapier to check for a Sheet that doesn’t exist yet until that first form submission. Then how to make that same zap see that it’s previously been created. I can have it check after the Sheet has been created but I can’t figure out how to tell it to check for a name in the Zap if the form hasn’t been filled out yet in order to create the new Sheet.

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks.

 

Hey ​@DanP, welcome to the Community! 🎉

Ah, yes Google Sheets doesn’t have the sort of “find spreadsheet” action you’d need but you could potentially use a Google Drive Find a File action to look for the file. Then use Paths by Zapier to have the Zap either create the spreadsheet if it didn’t find it and add the bid to it or, if it already exists then just add a new row to the existing spreadsheet.

You’d want to set up the paths to check whether the _zap_search_was_found_status field output by the Google Drive action is either true (meaning it found an existing spreadsheet) or false (meaning it didn’t find one). 

Can you give that a try and let us know how it goes?


Thanks ​@SamB. How would I dynamically have it check for the name since the new spreadsheet is dynamically named based off of data coming from the Gravity Form (form title + name of page the form is on). This form will be on multiple pages and will grab the title of the form and title of page as a portion of the new Google Sheet name. 

How would I set up a check for a dynamically created name? I seem to only be able to check for a sheet that was already created. This data will be held in the GF data.

Thanks!

 


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