Why does deleting empty rows on Google Sheets delete rows that are being used on Glide?
I just tried to delete a bunch of empty rows on sheets and it started deleting rows on the Glide side that were actual paid accounts!
I pressed undo a bunch of times to restore them but then it accidentally created a duplicate of one of the accounts on Glide somehow even though there is only 1 on google sheets.
Not sure what to do about the duplicate but, that was unexpected and I’m so glad i caught it before i permanently deleted a bunch of paid profiles!
Was it actually deleting data on the Glide side, or did it appear that way? I think the sync can get a bit whacked out temporarily if row position for existing rows changes in the google sheet.
So when you deleted the empty rows in the google sheet, what happened? Did other populated rows actually disappear in the google sheet, or did you only observe them disappearing within glide?
Did you observe this behavior in the glide data editor, or did you see rows disappearing in the actual app?
I’m just thinking a refresh of the data in glide would have corrected it and what you observed was only a temporary glitch while glide was re-syncing it’s copy of the data from what’s in the google sheet.
3 Likes
I just saw the rows disappear from the Glide editor, and then panicked and un-did my deletion of the empty rows on sheets. They didn’t disappear on the Google Sheet side, bc it was just empty rows, so it could have adjusting on the Glide side but a couple minutes had passed by before I figured it out and they remained gone. My duplicate is also still there on the Glide side. And I do see a duplicate on the user facing side too, but i’m afraid to delete it now 
Hard to say where the duplicate came from. Probably with the rapid Undo’s, thinks got whacked out and you maybe restored a previously deleted row, or just mucked up the sync. I think you are fine to delete the duplicate. Like I said, to some level I think the rows are position based, although Glide should be able to handle deletes like this. I know others have automated scripts that delete empty rows, so it shouldn’t be a problem. So, when you delete an empty row in the google sheet, it shifts the entire table up one row, so in Glide’s eyes, an empty row that glide was ignoring is now populated with data, but it’s still ignoring the row. Because of that it probably “appears” to be deleted even though it isn’t. I’d be more concerned if populated rows actually started disappearing from the google sheet. I would do a data refresh in the glide builder, or just refresh you browser, and I would think the missing rows would show up.
2 Likes
