Inbounds to Smartsheets from external sources

Rick Segal

I know there are a few connectors for outbound (ODBC) data to all kinds of places but has anybody gone the reverse, i.e. inbound from, say excel, to a sheet.  I get the reason to export into tools but I'd think there would be enough cases for being able to pull in data from other places.

Anybody?

Jim Hook

Rick, I have often wondered this too. There are several 3rd party apps that let you do that, Zapier, etc. One of the issues is how would a typical google sheet or Excel workbook trigger a transfer to a Smartsheet unless it had that capability built into it? In our case we ended up writing a custom app that uses the Smartsheet API to transfer project data into several Smartsheets when I tell it to, something I do early each workday morning. We could do those transfers automatically but there are internal reasons why it is better for me to trigger it when needed.

Rick Segal

Jim,

Thanks for the quick reply.  I'm going to take a look at Zapier and see if that will do the trick. The things I need to pull in aren't particularly complicated.

Seems odd to me Smartsheet would spend such an extensive amount of time helping data leave versus helping customers bring more into Smartsheets and increasing stickiness to the product.

Again, thank you.

Rick

Richard Rymill SBP

Rick and Jim

the need to get data from Excel or Google into Smartsheet and update what is already there, as opposed to creating a whole new sheet, is a popular request. 

We use Zapier for the simple criteria, but but for a more complex solution that adds conditional logic, offline capability, signatures and complete synchronisation, we use Appsheet. 

Jim i'd be interested to see your API solution? Sounds good? 

Happy to do a 1 2 1 if you are free next week? WE are constantly seeking even smarter systems for our clients and welcome new ideas? 

Regards RichardR

Jim Hook

Richard,

Our API transfer process is a small part of a much larger internal application we created for managing our consulting projects. The app can generate several different reports that I used to have to copy and paste into Smartsheet. About a year and a half ago we added several API transfer capabilities where our app clears a space in the destination Smartsheet and transfers an array of data via the API starting in a row that each Smartsheet specifies. We still trigger each transfer manually from our app since I wanted to be able to control when new data comes into Smartsheet. I do extensive error and synchronization checking in Smartsheet to make sure our internal app and Smartsheet stay in sync (and to catch any errors I've made) and doing it during the workday risks changes being made by employees entering time during the update process resulting in nuisance error flags. Basically our internal app tracks time charges by project, role, person and hours and my Smartsheet app does the financials and all sorts of analysis based on that data.

Jim

 

Rick Segal

Richard,

Thanks for the addition of Appsheet.  I'm going to test this along with Zapier.  Most of what I have is dead simple.  With respect to building something with the APIs, longer term.

 

Thank for the response.

Rick