Airtable Bulk Importing Google Spreadsheets / CSVs

[Andrii_Azimov]

Hi all,

We discovered Airtable as awesome organizational database tool and started to use it extensively. We loved it for the way it’s organized and well-thought.

But what we really missed there is “Google Sheets magic”:

• Being able to do advanced calculations
• Data blending
• Filtering
• Allowing someone to use data from Airtable without even knowing Airtable exists

With that in mind, we developed an Google Spreadsheets add-on as a missing link between Airtable and Google Spreadsheets.

We made it to solve particular issues within our company and for internal use only. But we thought that this add-on can help other people to make their lives better by combining powers of two great database tools: Airtable and Google Spreadsheets we shared it with other people. So anyone is welcome to give it a try.

Webpage:
http://railsware.com/case-studies/airtable-importer/

Download: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airtable-importer-by-rail/kngidnifbonbaembhpnjlpeefhmjpegb

Thanks.

[Kai_Muscher]

Solved! Thanks a lot Dmitry. I don’t know why but I had to sign off from my Google account and re-login. All fine!

K

[Philip_B]

Fantastic! Thank you!

[Larry_Price]

@Dmitry_Pliska I’m getting an issue with the add on. It gives me the following error:

Error: Request failed: https://airtable-proxy-server.herokuapp.com/?sharedUrl=https://airtable.com…

It doesn’t matter what base I try to use it from, so I cut off the rest of the sharing link there, but I do give it a full valid link. Please advise.

[Dmitry_Pliska]

Hi Larry,
Sorry for inconvenience, sometimes server goes down. Just restarted it, should work fine.

[Raymon_Geis]

Hi @Dmitry_Pliska!
Thanks for this awesome Add on.

Question, is it possible to have Airtable only update the columns that are actually in Airtable? Meaning, if Airtable only has 3 columns, and I have 7 columns in Sheets, whatever is in column 7 will still get erased upon update from the Add on, even though there is no 7th column in Airtable. Is there a way to protect data added in Sheets so that it doesn’t get erased when the update goes through?

Thanks!

[Dmitry_Pliska]

Hi, no, add-on just re-imports Airtable data and overwrites the whole sheet.
As a solution, I would suggest you to follow approach we are using in the company:

• all sheets that are filled with Airtable imports are left “as is”, so called “datasource”, with no formulas etc.
• at another sheet use references like =datasource!A1:L38 and use this sheet as you want since it’ll never be overwritten by Airtable Importer

Hope it helps :slightly_smiling_face:

[Umut_Cankurt]

google spreadsheets is able to export (export) airtable data with this application

[Jason_Hawkes]

Hi,

Just installed this today.

It pulled the data for the first time and since has show the following error.

Script Error - No item with the given ID or you dont have permission.

Jason…

[Pavel_Pavlovsky]

Thank you, Jason for your interest in our add-on! We’re in touch in support tread. Hope you’ll get the issue resolved soon.
Pavel Pavlovsky
Product Manager at Railsware

[Albert_Dempsey]

We use Google Sheets with several tabs, formulas, vlookups, and links to data in other tabs. A .csv import into Airtable won’t capture all that complexity. Can your add-on do it?

Once we’ve imported everything, we won’t use Google Sheets anymore.