Question

Unable to Automate Assignment Tracking from PDFs to Google Calendar

  • 10 November 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 25 views

What I am trying to accomplish:

 

I am a student and my course assignments for classes are provided via a PDF file, I want to automate a system to search through these "Course Assignment Sheets" as they are called at my school and input the assignments with the correct date and the corresponding assignment description into all-day events in my google calendar. I will attach an image below of the Course Assignment Sheet for reference, there are two primary columns within it, one for the date and the other for the assignment description. Moving top to bottom through the Course assignment sheet the date on the left corresponds directly to the assignment description on the right. I want a zap that can automate finding this and then input the assignments with the proper date and description into all-day events inside my google calendar. I would like it to search for the PDF files/ look through them from my Google Drive if possible.

 

I am very new to Zapier and even after multiple tutorials both in and outside the Zapier website I have been unable to figure out how to set this up. It seem what I’m trying to do is a bit more complicated than what the tutorials show so I don’t know how to go about doing it, any help would be much appreciated!

 

Here are the Course assignment Sheets for reference to have a better idea of what they look like: 

 


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1 reply

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hello there @ICY, welcome to the Community! 🎉 

You might need to look at using an app like Docparser to extract the data from the PDF on Google Drive. From there you could use the information it extracts from the PDF to create the events in Google Calendar.

Not sure if Docparser would output the information from the different table rows as line items. But if it does then you need want to use a Looping by Zapier action to run through the data in each line item and add it as a new event in Google Calendar. You can find out more about using loops here: Loop your Zap actions

Do you think that approach could work?

If I've misunderstood what you're looking to do or you run into any issues in setting this up just let us know. Always happy to help further!