Automatic Import of PDF Files into Airtable from Local or Google Drive Folders

How are you matching each file to a particular drawing number? Does the name of each file contain the drawing number? Does the CSV file contain a public URL that points to each file?

In either case, this is all very simple to accomplish with Make’s advanced automations & integrations.

Make offers CSV parsing tools, Google Drive integration, Airtable integration, and much more.

It even offers text functions that enable you to parse text — for example, pulling information out of a filename.

However, if you’ve never used Make before, then it could be  a little challenging because it takes a while to learn how to use Make,  so I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. 

If you can give more details, maybe I can guide you a little bit further on how to setup Make.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Hello Scott, 

thank you for your answer.

Indeed, in my CSV file and my Airtable table, the drawing number corresponds to the file name. The extension (.PDF, .STP, or .JPEG) determines the field in which the file will be stored.

I’ve never used MAKE before — I’m just getting started with automation — so I’ll gladly accept any help that’s offered.

thank you 

It will probably take you a few hours to learn Make, so be sure to check out that thread that I linked to above, because I have an introductory Loom video there.

But I can give you a few tips to get started by showing you 2 screenshots below.

You would simply need to monitor your Google Drive folder for all the new files that you add to it. (If you right-click on the module, you can go back in time to capture all the files that you have previously placed in that folder.)

Then, you would parse out the drawing number from each filename, and set the drawing number to a variable. I show how to do this in the 2nd screenshot below.

Then, you would search for that drawing number in Airtable to find the record that needs updating. If it can’t find a pre-existing record in Airtable, that’s why you will use the “Upsert Record”  module as the last module. “Upsert” means that it will create a brand new record if the record doesn’t previously exist, or it will update the existing record if it does exist.

Airtable will ONLY accept public URLs to add a file to an attachment field, which is why you need to use the “Get A Share Link” module which will give you the “web content link” of the file. Send that “web content link” to Airtable.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Airtable offers a Google Drive integration that does what you need I think, syncs up as one record per file in Drive:

https://www.airtable.com/integrations/google-drive
 

And to use it you’d add a new import source:

And then look for Drive:

Assuming your file names include the drawing number it’ll be pretty easy for you to map them to your Airtable records!