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Rookie needs help integrating Google Calendar with Google Sheets

  • 23 September 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 65 views

Good day all, 

I am new to Zapier and must admit that I’m struggling to understand how Zapier works, particularly in the Google Sheets/Calendar integrations.

 

I’ll explain what I’m hoping for, and I would be exceedingly grateful for anyone that can help me understand how to set this up. 

 

Our business is custom manufacturing of some exceptionally complex products with equally complex schedules. We use Google Calendar to schedule nearly all of them. 

We have about 10 Google Calendars that are shared by the whole team, and some calendars that are shared only by certain groups of us. Some are “individual person only” calendars. 

 

We very much need to get away from trying to view and edit all these calendars using the Google Calendar web interface, it’s killing us. It’s so tedious. Sometimes we need to enter 5-10 tasks and we can only do “death by a thousand clicks” entering them into the Calendar Web Interface one at a time.

 

I am trying to find a way for my team to be able to access ALL of these calendars via one shared Spreadsheet.

  • Create new Calendar entries in Google Sheets that automatically update when entered. 
     
  • Automatically add to the Spreadsheet any new Calendar entries that are made via the Google Calendar web interface. 
     
  • I want Tasks that are dragged-and-dropped onto different dates on the Calendar web interface to update their information within the Google Spreadsheet. 
     
  • I want to be able to view each Calendar within the Spreadsheet, hopefully with each Calendar being given it’s own tab at the bottom of the screen.
     
  • Calendar Entries would be in rows. Each new row of information is a new Calendar entry. 


    So what is possible here?
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Best answer by adamsmartschan 23 September 2020, 21:55

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Userlevel 5
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@Matt M -

If we make this a job for Airtable, rather than Google Sheets, I think this (or darn close to all of it) would be possible. Google just made their own version with Tables, but it’s not on Zapier yet. Plenty of UI-focused advantages over Google Sheets; it’s made for this type of thing.

Happy to hop on a quick call if you want to run through what could work here. This is a number of zaps – at least three – plus some automation work within Airtable. But the platforms are flexible enough that we can make it happen ;)

If this can work with Google Sheets, that will be a win for everyone here on our team. I have no experience with Airtable, so I looked it up and it’s a pretty impressive system, so I have no bias against it. It’s just that everyone here has immediate access to Google Sheets and knows how to use it.

Userlevel 5
Badge +6

Gotcha!

Most of this would be possible. The one major exception I can see is “I want to be able to view each Calendar within the Spreadsheet, hopefully with each Calendar being given it’s own tab at the bottom of the screen.” Google Sheets zaps are meant to work with a specific spreadsheet, not an entire workbook. Airtable uses “views” for this, with the data centralized and parsed out. Sheets actually segregates the data. So you’d need to set up a lot of zaps to get this part moving in Sheets.

Ok. So to make sure I’m understanding you, basically every calendar would need to have it’s own Google Sheet document and it’s own Zap(s), correct? 
 

Or is there a way of doing all of the calendars within the same Sheets document?

 

 

 

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