Google Drive Sync: File picker is empty despite Team Plan and Admin permissions

Airtable does not support syncing from Google Sheets to Airtable.

Airtable supports syncing from Google Drive to Airtable, where Airtable will list your Google Drive files in Airtable.

That’s why you’re seeing an empty folder — because Airtable is asking you which folder of files you want to sync to Airtable.

If you want to sync from Google Sheets to Airtable, you would need to custom-build your own syncing solution for this by using an external automation platform such as Make’s Google Sheets integrations.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

Hope this helps!

If 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

Hi @ScottWorld,

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I appreciate the suggestion to use Make.

However, I believe there might be a misunderstanding about Airtable's current native capabilities. According to Airtable's official documentation for the Team plan (which I am on), the "Sync from Google Drive" feature is specifically designed to create a one-way, automatically-updating table from a source file, including Google Sheets. This is a native feature meant to handle this exact use case, without needing a third-party automation tool.

My specific issue, which is very unusual, is that after performing all the necessary authentication and permission steps (including approving the Airtable app as a Google Workspace Admin), the Google Drive file picker in Airtable remains completely empty.

The problem isn't that the feature doesn't exist, but that a permission block somewhere in the Google/Airtable connection seems to be preventing it from working on my specific account.

Since Airtable Support has not yet responded and the native Sync feature is currently blocked for me, I have decided to move forward with a temporary workaround. I will perform a one-time import of my 18,000 rows from the Google Sheet to a static Airtable table. This will at least allow me to continue building the rest of my system while I wait for a permanent solution to the sync problem.

Thanks again for your input.

I can’t tell if you are a human or an AI bot, since all of your posts are eerily similar to how ChatGPT writes.

However, if you are a human, you are misunderstanding Airtable’s documentation, since what you want is not supported by Airtable — as I already mentioned above.

If you believe that you have discovered some part of Airtable’s documentation that has misled you into thinking that this is possible, then please provide the link to the documentation.

Again, like I already said above, what you want to do is not possible.

Hope this helps!

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

I'm not worried about being similar to GPT, I don't care. I was looking for a solution that doesn't seem to come. :-). I think here is the answer, but it doesn't work. :-)

https://support.airtable.com/docs/airtable-sync-integration-google-drive

There is absolutely nothing in that article that mentions syncing from a Google Sheet to Airtable.

The word “sheet” doesn’t even appear on that page at all, except where it mentions the “type of file” that a Google Drive file might be tagged as.

Once again, as I have now tried to explain to you multiple times in multiple different ways, what you are looking to do is not possible without 3rd-party tools, such as Make’s Google Sheets integrations.

Please try very hard to understand what I’m telling you here: You can sync a list of files from Google Drive to Airtable, but you cannot sync a Google Sheets spreadsheet to Airtable. You can only import a Google Sheets spreadsheet into Airtable.

Hope this helps!

If 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

To Scott’s point above:

 

I would strongly suggest to use Zapier, Make, or n8n for your specific use case.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Hi Scott,

Okay, thank you for the clarification. I appreciate you explaining the nuances of the sync functions.

The reason for my focus on a native solution is the scale of my project. I need to build a "dictionary" table with the postal codes for all major European countries. For context, the UK dataset alone has over 1.7 million postcodes, and the total dataset will be several million rows (ZIP | City | Country), sharded across multiple Sheets. My goal was to avoid using a third-party automation for every single lookup against such a large dataset due to performance and cost concerns.

Unfortunately, I am currently unable to use the native "Sync from Google Drive" feature. As described, I am encountering a technical issue where the file picker remains empty, despite having the correct Team plan and all necessary permissions approved as a Google Workspace Admin.

Given this technical block, I will need to think of another approach.

Thank you again for your time.

You can’t have 1.7 million records in Airtable, so that wouldn’t be possible anyways. You would have to make API calls to your dataset which lives elsewhere.

If you want all of your records to live inside your database, then I would suggest looking into Apple’s FileMaker, which can handle billions or trillions of records.

As a certified FileMaker developer for 30 years, feel free to contact me if you need referrals to great FileMaker developers.

 Hi Mike, I was probably wrong, I misunderstood the function. I have to do it via zap or via make, or scale down the idea. Thanks for your collaboration. :-)

Scott: just because I can't put a huge number of rows on airtable I hoped to have found the solution with the synchronization. I'll check this option FileMaker from Apple. Thanks