Adding data to a Google spreadsheet via email

Figgy

Is this possible? I want to add a row of data (let's say 6 columns, strings) to a spreadsheet by sending an email. Then another email, it adds to the next row. And so on.

If anyone could point me in the right direction that would be super helpful, or just tell me I'm nuts and this can't be done.

bowen

I don't think it is with built in tools, you could theoretically make something like that with their API and a programming language.

localh77

I actually started looking into this a month or two ago, but I haven't had the time to write something yet. The first answer on this page was what I found as a start: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32890847/google-apps-scripts-extract-data-from-gmail-into-a-spreadsheet.

It isn't terribly elegant, but it looks like it's a matter of having an email filter tag incoming emails with a certain label, then having a script periodically run and read through each message with that label.

It's nice because it doesn't look like it requires any fancy extensions, just email filters and Google scripts. But it would be nicer if it could somehow be triggered automatically when a certain email comes loan. But I haven't figured that out yet.

Grobian

If you are coding a script like localh77 describes, then my next question would be why you use email in the first place. Google scripts can be published as a web app which can then be called from other applications or whatever. Even just calling a URL like

https://script.google.com/.../exec?String1=Figgy&String2=bowen&String3=localh77...

to send the strings and then process them in the script like the stackoverflow solution


At a glance it didn't look like Google scripts have a trigger for incoming emails, so you would need to do something timebased (e.g. check every 30 minutes if something came in) and I don't know how often they allow you do run it (edit: seems to be once per hour?). The web app approach allows immediate updates to the spreadsheet whenever a request is fired off.



Also taking another step back: I assume you want to generate the email automatically somewhere? Because otherwise you could just use a google form to populate a spreadsheet.



And now I just found this by accident: https://mailparser.io/blog/email-to-google-docs-sheets/ That's a commercial solution for the problem. Looks expensive to me, but you didn't specify what this was for and maybe you have a budget but no coding know-how.

Figgy

Specifically, having MailChimp (email marketing software) synced with a Google Sheet took for new entries to add to a subscriber list.

Then emails are sent whenever someone opts in via one of many web forms. This avoids custom development making the web form software integrate with the marketing software. It's possible that way, but I thought there might be an easier way.

cls357

Figgy wrote: »

Is this possible? I want to add a row of data (let's say 6 columns, strings) to a spreadsheet by sending an email. Then another email, it adds to the next row. And so on.

This thread is a bit old and probably you have already found a way to do that but just in case here it is a step by step explanation:

Email to excel with Email Parser