Automation to automatically import Excel attachment in email into Base

Airtable has an Airtable Sync Integration called Emailed Data. This gives you an email address where you can send Excel files or CSV files to the email address, and Airtable will add that data into a table.

However, there is a major downside to this. It doesn’t let you edit any of the data after the import. I have no idea why. You could presumably copy and paste all of the data from the non-editable table into an editable table afterwards.

Alternatively, if you can attach a CSV file to your emails instead of an Excel file (i.e. export your data from Excel to CSV ahead of time), then you could completely automate the entire process of emailing your file & automatically importing the data into Airtable by using Make:

1. Make will give you a special email address using its mailhook feature. (Alternatively, you could just have Make monitor your existing email account.)

2. Make has a built-in CSV parsing tool that will parse the CSV file for you.

3. And then, you would use the Airtable modules to create one new record for each row in your CSV file.

Otherwise, you could always manually import CSV files into your base by manually using the CSV Import Extension. But again, you’d need to export your data from Excel to CSV first, and then you could manually import the files.

p.s. I’ve done this exact type of automation many times for many clients of mine. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable & Make consultant to help you with any of the automated stuff that I mentioned above, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultants — ScottWorld