Forum Discussion

MikeTamoush's avatar
MikeTamoush
Qrew Commander
3 years ago

Extract data from CSV in file attachment field

Is there a native way (Perhaps with pipelines?) to extract data from an Excel file that is uploaded to a file attachment field?

I know that Juiced has an add-on for this, which I may use, but if there is a new native way, I always prefer to keep things native.

Maybe this has been addressed before but I can't seem to find any community postings on the subject.

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Mike Tamoush
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  • PrashantMaheshw's avatar
    PrashantMaheshw
    Qrew Captain
    3 years ago
    You can consider a connected table (or pipeline) perhaps ? If you have a CSV instead of uploading it into QuickBase , you can upload it in Google Drive ,Dropbox , and let QuickBase sync it from there

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    Prashant Maheshwari
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    • MikeTamoush's avatar
      MikeTamoush
      Qrew Commander
      3 years ago
      Unfortunately I cannot use a connected table as the CSV I get in my email is not formatted correctly. However, I can get an xlsx file formatted appropriately. I could manually save this as a CSV then use a Sync, but then that involves a manual process. I'm thinking to fully automate I can use Pipelines to take a file attachment from an email and upload it to a table. If I can get the data out of that, then I can fully automate.

      Or even better, if Sync worked with an xlsx file!

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      Mike Tamoush
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      • PrashantMaheshw's avatar
        PrashantMaheshw
        Qrew Captain
        3 years ago
        There are tonnes of solution available I believe which will be able to help you to convert your xlsx to csv in an automated manner. If attachments are coming in email from a erp or bank or some other software, they almost always will have solution for csv as well. 

        Here are few I found from Google Search

        https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5256733/convert-xlsx-file-to-csv-using-batch
        https://github.com/dilshod/xlsx2csv

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        Time for a story


        Few years back I had used a super convoluted solution where emails were downloaded automated by using TheBat! email client (on Windows) which allows to save all attachment in a folder, then on MacOSX using Hazel(app), will use a command line tool would scan the files to csv , Hazel (app) would then move it to GDrive. 

        It worked for few months (but would require constant tweaks every week).

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        Prashant Maheshwari
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