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  • How to automatically create a folder of files based on a list of file names in Google Sheets?

Hello! I am trying to automate my workflow and am not sure the best way to go about it and would appreciate any advice to set me in the right direction.  I run an online poster print shop, and weekly I am downloading a list (spreadsheet) of all my orders that need printed for that week. On this order list is a list of all the sku’s that need printed, which are relevant to the files/file names that need printed, but it’s takes me a lot of time to go through my master folder of files, copy each file that needs printed and paste it into a ‘ready to print’ folder. I have literally tens of thousands of skus because of different sizes.  I feel like there’s got to be a way to take my list of skus/file names, and automatically make copies of all the files that are on this list and put them into a new “ready to print” folder, instead of manually doing it like I am now. 

 

So for example, I have a spreadsheet list with the Sku’s

acrylic-kitchensignv1-30x20

acrylic-christmassignv2-24x24

etc.

so my file names for these skus would be like

kitchensignv1-30x20

christmassignv2-24x24

 

How do I take this spreadsheet list, and trigger the event to make copies of the files that are on the list and paste them into a new, “ready to print” folder? I currently have all these files stored locally but would upload them into a master folder on google drive or dropbox to achieve this automation,  but wanted to see if what I’m doing is possible before setting that up. Thanks in advance for any advice to set me in the right direction. 

 

Hi @allisonkbye, welcome to the Community!

Am I correct in thinking that you’re wanting to trigger the Zap on a weekly basis, look up all the files listed in the spreadsheet, find the files in Google Drive/Dropbox and copy them to the ready to print folder?

If so, I’d have thought you could build a Zap with the following setup (using Google Drive):

  • Trigger: Every Week (Schedule by Zapier) - set to run weekly on a specific day of the week and time.
  • Action: Get Many Spreadsheet Rows (Advanced, output as Line Items) (Google Sheets) - gets information from X number of rows - limited to a maximum of 500 rows.
  • Action: Create Loop From Line Items (Looping by Zapier) - runs through the below actions for each line item (row) found by the previous action. See our Loop your Zap actions for more details.
    • Action: Find a File (Google Drive) - looks for the file based on the name listed in the row.
    • Action: Copy File (Google Drive) - makes a copy of the file and saves it in the “ready to print” folder.

 

Do you think that approach would work? If I've misunderstood what you're looking to do or you run into any issues in setting this up just let us know. Always happy to help further!

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