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We have a Microsoft account set up with OneDrive and Microsoft Excel. The goal is we want to email a spreadsheet attachment to our Outlook account and then import the rows of our spreadsheet into a database. The first zap will have Microsoft Outlook as the trigger and new email as the trigger event. Outlook will send the attachment to OneDrive so it can save. Then in a separate Zap have OneDrive trigger on file upload and read all results from the spreadsheet which then uploads the results to a database action step. 

Hey @Arment! Thanks for taking the time to outline your workflow. It sounds like you may be asking about what’s possible and that you’ve already checked out the triggers and actions for the apps you plan to use - great first steps!

 

You might be able to incorporate the CSV importer into what you’ve described: 

I am also curious to hear about the database action step you’re using as I wonder if we can cut out the need for some of the other steps you have described. Have you started building this? Taking that step will help you further see what’s possible and I imagine, surface some other important questions. 

Let us know - we’d love to help think through this one with you!

Hi Jesse,

The database action step is an application we developed on the Zapier platform called iAppConnector which is a connection to a SQL database called iMIS. The goal is to take each line from a CSV or spreadsheet and import the data using iAppConnector, however there is an added twist by request to allow spreadsheets to be imported in via email.

As we started building this setup we realized Microsoft OneDrive and Excel may not be a good fit as we require a file lookup of the spreadsheet we imported from email. Google Drive and Google Sheets on the other hand do support a trigger lookup of a new spreadsheet import. There is a tight rope to walk on as multiple files imported from Microsoft Outlook email get sent to Google Drive as a Zip file so the email must not have any images or attachments other than the import spreadsheet. That said it is possible for Google to pick up the spreadsheet from email, read the rows, and import it to the database using iAppConnector.

Some questions I would like to ask are:

  1. Can we make a request to Microsoft to add in support for triggering on new spreadsheet upload to OneDrive.
  2. Google Sheets only allows 20 rows to be read at once. Is there an example Zap setup where all rows can be read? I imagine this requires a repeater or loop of some sort. 

 

You might be able to incorporate the CSV importer into what you’ve described: 

I am also curious to hear about the database action step you’re using as I wonder if we can cut out the need for some of the other steps you have described.

 

After reviewing the CSV importer I realized we can cut out the need for OneDrive/Google Drive, but only if the file is in CSV format. I don’t believe there will be any objections to that so we can offer this as our proposed solution. 

Hey @Arment fantastic! Glad to hear you were able to get to a solution. 🙂 I am going to mark that as the best answer but if anything else comes up around this, feel free to reply to this thread or start a new thread and we can help you out!

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