Copying bunch of records over to Google Sheets

[WilliamPorter]

I’m trying to figure out the best way to move records created and stored in Airtable over to Google Sheets for nicely-formatted printing. I looked at Zapier but as far as I can tell, the only triggers available for Airtable are “new record” triggers so they pick up just 1 record.

Is there any way to do this other than exporting the records from Airtable to CSV, and then importing them into Sheets?

William

p.s. My question is in the same ballpark as this poster’s question but he hasn’t gotten an answer yet that helps me and in any case he’s asking about updating records and all I want to do is copy them from Airtable to Sheets.

[openside]

You can perform bulk update triggers using our On2Air: Actions product

[Abraham_Bochner]

For all your integrations use https://www.integromat.com/

It’s about 100000000000000000 times better then Zapier

[M_k]

Hi @WilliamPorterTech

I agree with @Abraham_Bochner.

You can do so much more with Integromat.

I also believe that you could use Integromat to do what you want, by using the Airtable=>Watch Records and Google Sheet=>Add Row modules. This should automatically take bulk records from Airtable and add them to GS worksheet.

There is also a free plan and a Facebook community forum, if you need help.

Hope this helps.

Mary

[Bill_French]

Abraham_Bochner:

For all your integrations use https://www.integromat.com/

I tend to temper an answer to this question by adding that the complete business requirements must be known before making broad implementation decisions. Integromat is certainly a good platform for gluing stuff together, but it should not be the one choice for “all” integration challenges. Just sayin’ …

[Olga_Rusnak]

@WilliamPorterTech

Yes, I totally understand what you want to do. And I have got a solution. Try Coupler.io Google sheets add-on that will synchronize your data between Airtable and Google Sheets.

Switch on the data refresh frequency for 1 hour, and your data will be always up-to-date in your destination sheet.

Name that sheet raw data, then create formulas or dashboards in new sheets and reference the data from the raw one.

[WilliamPorter]

Thank you to those who responded to my question. I checked out the solutions you suggested. Unfortunately none of them seem to do what I want.

Perhaps I wasn’t as clear as I need to be. I am not trying to sync a base with a (Google) sheet. As I said in my original post, I’m doing this simply in order to have a way to print a report. If Airtable weren’t so bad at this, I’d do it entirely in Airtable.

.

It looks like I’ll end up doing this by hand. These are the steps I’ll have to take:

1. Go to the right view in the Airtable base and make sure that filter is showing precisely the records I need to see.
2. Copy all those records.
3. Switch to Google Sheets and open the template I’ve created for the report
4. Go to the appropriate starting cell (might not be A1) and paste
5. Print the report and confirm that it looks okay.
6. Close the sheet without saving.
7. Return to the base and mark those records as having been printed

The key issue seem to be, first, triggering the process, and second, copying not just a single record but the entire set of filtered records in a particular view. Most of the connection services (like Zapier) seem to use record-level triggers (e.g., record created, record modified) and then they work only on the record that triggered the zap or whatever it is. Perhaps I should investigate a macro utility. I could do step 1 above manually, and step 2 (selecting all and copying) could certainly be done by a macro utility, and so could step 3. I’m just not sure whether that’s much help.

Anyway, perhaps one day Airtable will make the page designer block work better for multipage reports. Then I will be very happy.

Thanks to all who responded!

William

[Bill_French]

WilliamPorterTech:

I’m doing this simply in order to have a way to print a report .

Yep, that’s really different from the topic title. It’s much more like this.

[WilliamPorter]

Bill.French:

Yep, that’s really different from the topic title. It’s much more like this .

Well as I said I apologize if I wasn’t clear at first. For what it’s worth, I do think my topic – “copying records to Google Sheets” – describes fairly precisely what I’m trying to do. If somebody reads that to mean “syncing Airtable and Google Sheets,” well, again, I apologize for my lack of clarity. :slightly_smiling_face:

The link you provided (to a response of yours talking about how you’ve integrated Google Sheets with Airtable via the API) is awesome. It’s becoming clear to me that, if I’m going to stay with Airtable, I’m going to have to, um… Well I was going to say I’m going to have to “dust off” my javascript skills. But it’s been almost twenty years since I did much javascript so it’s going to be less a matter of dusting off and more a matter of learning it again. But I can do that. I’m getting close to being sufficiently motivated.

Thanks again, Bill.

William

[Bill_French]

WilliamPorterTech:

Well I was going to say I’m going to have to “dust off” my javascript skills.

It hasn’t actually changed that much. :winking_face: And this is a good skill to dust off if Airtable is in your future.