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Formating Lookup Value in Zapier Loops, before comparing it to Lookup Value?

  • 19 November 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 88 views

Hello,

I am currently struggeling with Zapier Loops. I have a database with randomly generated data records of employees, including their birthday. I would now like to run a Zapier Schedule on a daily basis and send an email with congratulations to all employees who have birthday on that day. The problem is that Zapier compares the Lookup Field 1 directly with the Lookup Value. You do not have the option of formatting it beforehand. The problem now is that Zapier never recognizes that someone has birthday (example birthday on first of January 1990: It is the first of January 2024 and Zapier makes the following comparison: first of January 1990 == first of January 2024 equals False). Although it is someone's birthday that day, Zapier doesn't realize it. I have two possible workarounds for that, but both are not very satisfying. The first solution is not to save the entire date as a date type, but to save the day and month, separated from the year as a text type in two different columns. Then I can easily check whether it's someone's birthday. The second solution is to use a validation that basically takes all data records in the Zapier Table and then filter them with Zapier filters if these employees do not have a birthday on that day. I don't find the first solution elegant, as I would like to save the entire date as a date type in my database and not separately as text. If you make changes, you can't open a calendar and adjust something, but have to write it manually as text in two columns, which is much more error-prone and less professional. The second solution is also not ideal, as Zapier runs through a large number of zaps every day. As soon as it reaches the Zapier filter, it counts as a completed Zap, even if the Zap is aborted at this point. I saw this in the Zap History. When testing the zap live, I had 50 zaps run through in one go, of which 49 had the status "Filtered" and only one had the status "Success", but this is still not satisfying. The ideal solution would be to format the lookup field 1 beforehand to filter out the day and month and then compare these with the day from the Zapier Schedule in one step. If no employees have a birthday on that day, the zap would end and only count as a single zap. As far as I know, this is not possible. If it is possible, please let me know. If you have some ideas, how to solve this, please let me know. Thank you for your time.

 

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Best answer by Troy Tessalone 19 November 2023, 18:38

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Hi @Martin.g 

Good question.

Here’s what I’d try…

Use Airtable: https://zapier.com/apps/airtable/integrations#triggers-and-actions

Airtable has Formula fields.

You can create a formula field to extract the day/month from the birth date and create a new date value that uses the current year.

Airtable has Views, which are segments of data. (sort, filter, etc.)

Airtable has Automations, which have a native integration with Gmail.

Configure an Airtable Automation to be triggered when a record enters a View to then send an email via Gmail.

No Zaps needed.

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