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Hi, I've gotten a connection between Sheets & my Discord server working and the setting is set to instantly send data from a new row created in the Sheet to the server. When I test the connection I immediately get the test message sent to the server, but when I actually input the data in the new row in the sheet it takes 2-3 minutes before the data gets sent to Discord.

Is this something that I can't change or is there a way to make the transmission immediate just like the tests are?


Hi @BrockD - good seeing you over here from Reddit!

So, while Google Sheets is listed as an 'Instant' trigger app, it actually runs a bit differently due to limitations with the Google Sheets API.

Maybe @jesse or another Zapier staffer will step in to clarify, but as it was explained to me by Zapier support a little while back, updated sheet data is sent in batches to Zapier, which means there could be anything from a zero to a few minutes lag. It's done this way to stop Zapier hitting global API rate limits with Google.

As far as I know, there's no way around it.


Hi @BrockD! I'm happy to help on this one!

The short answer is that there isn't a way to speed up the Zap, I'm sorry about that! The longer answer is that this is because the Google Sheets New and Update Row triggers work differently to most other triggers in Zapier.

Generally, there are two types of trigger for Zaps - polling triggers and webhooks. Broadly speaking, polling triggers check back with the trigger app at fixed intervals to see if there's new information, whereas webhooks send new information over as soon as it's available. It you're not already familiar with those, you can learn more about them in this guide to different types of triggers.

The Google Sheets instant triggers are a new kind of trigger - sort of a hybrid of the two. We get a webhook saying that the sheet has changed but that hook doesn't contain any information about the changes, so we then poll Google Sheets to get the information from the sheet.

This poll is set a couple of minutes in the future because if we get the information too quickly, a user might not have finished making changes to the row.

I hope that all makes sense, let me know if you have any questions!



Hi @Danvers

Thanks for clarifying! Might I suggest this gets added to the Google Sheets help page:

Google Sheets - Integration Help & Support | Zapier


I had wondered why the Google Sheet triggers were a weird hybrid of instant and there was no way to manual run them... this explains it :-)


Good shout @Andrew_Luhhu - I've submitted that change/addition to the help docs team for approval 🙂


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