New or Updated Spreadsheet Row in Google Sheets only works when a new row is added

Have you checked the helped articles? https://zapier.com/apps/google-sheets/help

Perhaps you can provide a screenshot of how your Zap trigger is configured.

FYI: The GSheet New/Updated Row trigger, while marked as Instant, is not technically instant.

The Google Sheets trigger is marked "instant" but it still takes a few minutes to trigger.

The new and updated spreadsheet row triggers for Google Sheets are unique in that when there is a trigger event in the spreadsheet, Zapier gets a notification webhook from the Google about this following that notification, Zapier sends Google Sheet a request asking for new data. After this, the trigger works using the normal polling mechanism and these new or updated rows returned will trigger the Zap. This process takes about 3 minutes overall so although the Google Sheets trigger is marked "instant" it really is a hybrid of both webhook and polling techniques. While being slower than any other "instant" trigger, it's still faster than all polling triggers which would take 5 or 15 minutes.

If you’re looking for an alternative to GSheets, then I suggest checking out Airtable: https://zapier.com/apps/airtable/integrations#triggers-and-actions

Thank you for the replies.

Yes, I had checked that help page (plus two more related to Sheets issues) before posting.

I got the live version to trigger in some cases, but not all of the cases where I wanted to, and it took much more than “a few minutes”. It’s hard to say when exactly because I tried multiple times, but it could be anywhere between 15 minutes and 3 hours. Basically the next day I noticed that some of the zaps had finally gone through.

When testing, I tried to isolate the issue as much as possible, and I put values into the trigger column that I hadn’t used anywhere else in the spreadsheet before (basically an integer that I kept increasing every time I made a change).

----

I now have a working setup that avoids the “New or updated spreadsheet row” trigger and uses the following setup instead: Webhook with a “first_row” parameter → Google Sheets: Get many spreadsheet rows (get 20 rows, starting at “first_row”)  → JavaScript converts the object into multiple rows → previous workflow. This requires manual triggering, but that’s fine with me for this use case.

Here’s the JavaScript:

// this is wrapped in an `async` function
// you can use await throughout the function

output = [];

for (const row of JSON.parse(inputData.rows)) {
  const formattedRow = row
    .map((val, idx) => ([convertToNumberingScheme(idx + 1), val]))
    .reduce((prev, curr) => {
      const [key, val] = curr
      prev[key] = val
      return prev
    }, {})
  output.push(formattedRow)
}





/////////////////////////////////////////////////

function convertToNumberingScheme(number) {
  var baseChar = ("A").charCodeAt(0),
      letters  = "";

  do {
    number -= 1;
    letters = String.fromCharCode(baseChar + (number % 26)) + letters;
    number = (number / 26) >> 0; // quick `floor`
  } while(number > 0);

  return letters;
}