Question

Google Sheets Error from halted execution: Nothing could be found for the search.

  • 31 August 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 520 views

This has to be a bug because I’ve already built this zap and it’s ran 100s of times the last few weeks until the past hour. In short, I only caught it when I noticed it didn’t run completely on the last trigger/input -- while other notifications did. Upon investigating, I realized the zap was halted/stopped due to the error in the title: 

Error from halted execution: Nothing could be found for the search.

Which is weird, never happened before on this. The step in question is the lookup row function on Google Sheets to which it’s looking up a name, in this case let’s call it “John Appleseed”. John Appleseed is present on the sheet in row 8 of column A. But the zap is reporting that it cannot be found. However at the same time, in the same sheet, if I change the name of “Jane Doe” that’ on row 5 of column A, the zap triggers just fine. 

The incident isn’t isolated to just John, it’s John and everyone else after him further down the column. The first 3-4 names are perfectly fine and trigger. But unfortunately for John and his colleagues, the task fails. 

I’m fairly experienced with Zapier and have built some pretty cool things with it, but I’ve never seen this before and don’t have an explanation as to why this is happening as I’ve spent the past 40 minutes testing different inputs. 

The closest thing I have is that the names are populated with a simple function: 

 

=FILTER(Names!$A3:$A,Names!$B3:$B = TRUE)

But again, it’s worked before. It works fine for the first 3-4, and nothing afterward down the column…

Weird. Waiting for support to investigate and get back to me as well. Hoping someone has the answer or explanation 

 

 


3 replies

Userlevel 7
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Hi @iDevante 

Good question.

To help us have full context, please post detailed screenshots with how each of your Zap steps is configured.

Showing screenshots with the top rows of your GSheet will help us as well. (be sure to show any formulas)

Check your Zap Runs history details to see the DATA IN/OUT for each Zap step to help you troubleshoot.

 

 

This post has been edited by a moderator to remove personal information. Please remember that this is a public forum and to remove any sensitive information prior to posting.

I knew you were going to reply haha! I was almost betting on it, thank you! 

But seriously, that truly is the extent of the problem/dilemma I’m having. I’ll post a screenshot below, but in the process I’ll have a rep fill out a Google form with their name included in the form as a data point -- a couple things happen in between including creating a new spreadsheet row (separate task), create a new calendar event (separate task) and then I take the info inputted from the form to lookup a value for the rep on the team to move forward in the zap/automation. And it was working up until today/this morning which is quite strange seeing as I’ve tried disabling/re-enabling the zap, duplicating the zap, starting a new zap just to test, but nothing seems to suffice or resolve this. 

The problem is I can pull the second last entry on the form with Michael’s name attached, and it works just fine. But if I pull the most recent or last entry on the form with Axel’s name attached, for example, it results in an error. I presume it’s a bug as there’s no difference between the two names on Google Sheets. No formatting differences, no spaces, no spelling errors, etc. Axel had submitted an entry yesterday and it was perfect. 

UPDATE: At the time of writing this, I would like to point out with additional testing as well that the problem seems to be arising directly from the formula that’s populating these names: =FILTER(NAME!$A3:$A,NAME!$B3:$B = TRUE) in which if I remove the formula and just keep the list, the zap does in fact work just fine as it’s supposed to. Didn’t always do that, but that seems to be the root problem here

 

 

 

 

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +14

This post has been edited by a moderator to remove personal information. Please remember that this is a public forum and to remove any sensitive information prior to posting.

@iDevante

From the screenshots we’re unable to see which Spreadsheet and Worksheet are being used in the Zap step and if those match to the values that would be shown in a GSheet browser URL.

 

From the screenshots we’re unable to see which column is being used as the Lookup Column.

 

Things to check…

Since we can’t see the full value in the GSheet we’re unable to check those against the values being used in the Zap step as shown in the screenshot.

Try doing a manual copy, then search to see if a matching value is found via a GSheet search.

Make sure the are no leading/trailing spaces or extra spaces in the value in the GSheet or the value from GForms.

You may want to add logic to the GSheets formula that includes a TRIM() function to help with extra spaces.

 

Things to try…

Perhaps consider using Airtable instead of GSheets.

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