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.

  • Home
  • Get Help
  • How Do I
  • How do I use Zapier to sort new Google Drive folders by name into specific master folders?
Question

How do I use Zapier to sort new Google Drive folders by name into specific master folders?

  • March 21, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 26 views
G

I have  Zap at present which creates a folder on google drive when I add an event in google calendar using the event name as the folder title  and then adds sub folders before setting up a trello card with the same name.

The issue I have is I want to be able to have zapier make the new folder go to a master folder depending on the name.

  • Example . 1 new event in calendar = George White kitchen project
  • zapier creates a folder with the name George White kitchen project in the master folder  G
  • I have the folders of the alphabet already set up
  • so depending on how I name the event it would go to the folder with the corresponding leter of the alphabet eg. White_George  kitchen project would be placed in the master folder W

I’m very new to all this stuff so any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Did this topic help you find an answer to your question?
This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

1 reply

SamB
Community Manager
Forum|alt.badge.img+11
  • SamBCommunity Manager
  • Community Manager
  • 7532 replies
  • March 25, 2024

Welcome to the Community, @Gavmo9! 🎉

There’s a couple approaches you could try:

1) Add branching logic to the Zap - use a filter or paths to check whether the folder name starts with a certain letter to determine which folder it should be added to. The issue with using filters for this is that you’d need to set up a Zap for every single possible master folder. With paths you can have up to 10 paths that contain a maximum of 3 nested paths (paths within a path) so you could handle it within a single Zap.

You can find out more about using filters and paths to add branching logic to Zaps here:


2) Use Formatter and search actions - you could potentially use a Formatter (Text > Extract Pattern) action to extract the first letter of the project name, and use that in a Find a Folder (Google Drive) action to locate the correct folder. Then in your action that creates the folder for the project, in the Parent Folder field you’d select the ID of the folder that’s found by the previous Find a Folder action. This approach is the most efficient of the two in my view.

You could use the \b(\w) pattern for this. That pattern would get the first letter from a project name. For example, the letter E from the project name of Example Project: 
8e8fe728b0d5daa5f0dba4a307d4a0f9.png

However, I did a quick test and it looks like searching for a folder name that’s only one character long won’t return a match as it needs a longer search value to be supplied. So you’d need to give those folders a longer title. Like “Projects - A”, “Projects - B”, “Projects - C” for example. That way you can select the extracted letter in the folder name you’re searching for like so: 
08bff97b05cf7fd2e2d5b0d5f1b88d88.png
Then you’d use the custom value option in the action that creates the project folder and select the ID of the folder that was found:

d04db6af807d95258adab51a93f5de0c.png

Hope that helps to get you pointed in the right direction. If you run into any issues or questions on the above suggestions do let me know! 🙂

Terms & Conditions