Workaround - User imports data via paste from clipboard

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I was today years old when I realized this workaround… maybe obvious to many but just to share:

Imagine you want a user to import data from a Spreadsheet. An easy way to offer this is to allow a user to copy the table from their own spreadsheet and then past it into a RTF text entry component.

So the user simply pastes into a field like this:
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Now you have the data you just need to clean it by adding a “Replace all” column (replacing \s+ with a comma). Here are the 2 columns to generate the comma separated list of data:

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Now you can use another Glide Table and convert the list into an array then populate the Name and Number column respectively…

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The last 2 columns now have the data that was entered by the user. Obviously the size and shape of the table of data needs to be taken into account, but in most of my usage cases this is pre-defined.

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Just thinking out aloud, you could take this a step further if you wanted to.

Let’s say for example you wanted the uploaded data inserted into an existing table.
What you could do is massage the parsed data into a JSON collection, and then post that to Make via a webhook. And then Make could post it back to Glide via the API, inserting new rows into the appropriate table.

You would probably need to build some validation into the process, but I don’t see why that wouldn’t work.

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The Make process should work whether it’s a Sheet or a Glide table. You can probably build a template column that will work with the Sheet API so you will need just one API call to add all rows. With Glide Tables, iterate over the rows and add one by one.

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