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I want to automate the importation of contact information from a excel document located on onedrive into an Active Campaign account. An existing zap is working as intended with a test excel document containing a limited amount of contacts (15 rows with roughly 80 columns each). When I want to edit the zap to use the real excel document containing 32000 rows, the zap fails to work properly.

An existing question was raised related to Google spreadsheet:

The reply to this question was that Google Spreadsheets are not optimized for large volumes of information (spreadsheets with around 10,000+ rows), and this can make it a challenge to access them via Zapier.

Would this issue also hold true in my case using Microsoft Excel instead of Google Spreadsheet? Is Zapier not able to process larger excel/csv documents like this? If not, what are other available automation options in Zapier to make this import procedure possible?

Hi @l.laumans 

Excel keeps timing out/I see 504 Gateway Timeout errors

You might see this happen with sheets with a large amount of rows.
Try using a smaller sheet for the workflow.
Tasks that hit this error can still often be replayed with success at a later time.
We are currently waiting on changes that will make this error happen less frequently; if you want to be notified of when this is ready or are continuing to hit problems, let us know on our contact form.

Just wanted to follow up here as spotted that @l.laumans had reached out to our Support team about this and were added to a bug report for 504 gateway timeout errors occurring when a Zap attempts to read/write to a large Excel document. We don’t have an ETA on when it will be resolved but we will be in touch by email and will update this thread once it is!

In the meantime, the recommended workaround would be to connect the Zap to a smaller Excel spreadsheet instead, as Troy suggested above.

Hey friends! 👋🏽

I wanted to swing by with a belated update and share this bug was recently closed.

The team recently released an update that should hopefully prevent these errors moving forward! If you’re still seeing this error though please don’t hesitate to open a ticket with my teammates in support.

Thanks as always for flagging this in community and happy zapping! ⚡️

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