Skip to main content

Get Support
Have a question? Let's get you an answer!

How Do I...? Troubleshooting Code & Webhooks Developer Zone

Other Help Resources
Wait, there's more! Check out these Community sourced spaces for additional resources.

Zapier Help Center Hire an Expert

Learning Resources
All of our best learning resources can be found here.

Featured Articles Show & Tell Zapier's products AI Hub Zapier Tools Hub

Share your knowledge
Give back to the Community by sharing your automation wins and helping to answer questions.

Share your success See unanswered questions User Groups

Other Learning Resources
Some of our favorite additional ways to upskill your Zapier knowledge.

Zapier Learn Zapier Blog Zapier Webinars

Product Updates
Check out what is new and upcoming with Zapier with our regular product updates.

Product Updates

Early Access Program
Want to join Early Access? Learn more here.

I have an Excel spreadsheet with leads. this particular zap is triggered by a mailchimp campaign that has been opened by one of those leads. I now use the find function to find them again in the spreadsheet. However, they may be in there several times. I only want to latest entry.

Unfortunately, Zapier only gives the option of using the FIRST row it finds, or returning all of them. That is useless to me, because I now can only either use the first Row ID, or the field that lists ALL the row ids. I tried to use the formatter to strip the earlier ones from this field, and it works, returning the last row id, but then it won’t let me use this output as the lookup value in my next step. 

Has anyone encountered this and have a solution? It would be great if an Excel sheet could be searched BACKWARDS to make this function work, or to have Zapier add another option in the find row funtionality for last as well as first.

Hi ​@sthieme 

Here’s a workaround…

Zap action: GSheets - Lookup Spreadsheet Row

Field: Search from Last Row

 

Hi there ​@sthieme 👋

How did you get on with Troy’s suggestion of using a Lookup Spreadsheet Row (Google Sheets) action with the Search from last row field enabled? Did that work as hoped?

Keep us posted on how it’s going, want to make sure you’re all set! 🙂

Hi ​@SamB and ​@Troy Tessalone ,

that would be great, except I’m not using Google Sheets. I’m using Excel. And, as so often, Google has capabilities that Excel does not. I rue the day that our organization switched from Google to Microsoft for cost saving reasons. If anyone knows of the same function for Excel, please let me know - I couldn’t find it.

Thanks for getting back to me ​@sthieme. With the Microsoft Excel Find Row action there isn’t a way to change the search from to look at the latest added rows first. To get that functionality added you’ll need to contact our Support team here to submit a new feature request for it. 

With the alternative approach Troy was suggesting you’d need to move the Excel file over to Google Drive (should be free to use with a personal, non-workspace Gmail account), then open it with Google Sheets. That should then give you the ability to save a copy of it as a Google Sheets file. From there it should be possible to use that Lookup Spreadsheet Row action in a Zap to search the spreadsheet from the bottom up. 

If you do go down that route, you’d also want to create another Zap to trigger from new rows added to the Excel file to add that same data to the Google Sheets copy of the spreadsheet. That way, the Zap that searches the Google Sheets spreadsheet will be able to see any new rows of data that may have been added to the Excel spreadsheet.

Hope that helps. Not an ideal solution I know, but if you give that a try and get stuck at all just let me know, happy to help further!

Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement