Macro to delete the old data

Question

I'm really new to this and would love some help where I'm currently stuck. I've created a macro to clear a spreadsheet. I've tried multiple triggers of onedit and onchange and haven't had luck with my end goal. I'm sending data (about 10 columns and 100 rows into a google sheets via zapier. Basically, I'm refreshing the data by replacing the data. So, before the data comes in, I wanted the macro to delete the old data. However, the macro actually deletes the new data coming in once it posts. Any scripts or workarounds that could help?

Answer 1

From what I know about Zapier it works on timed intervals. You can have a script run on time intervals just before the time Zapier inputs information and delete the old info.

Another approach would probably be to have a intermediary sheet.(Lets call this sheet, "sheet1". The final sheet can be called "sheet2". When Zapier writes data to sheet1 it can trigger the onChanged event. Take the information in sheet2 delete everything, then post the new data to sheet 2.

Finally, Zapier supports webhooks. You can publish your script as a web app and have it do a get or post to the app which runs the delete function. To give it time you can use the delay that Zapier provides.

Answer 2

What you are describing sounds like the perfect candidate for the IMPORTDATA worksheet function. The function is entered in a cell, as are all worksheet functions, and it takes a URL which points to a CSV or TSV file. Once entered the data referred to by the URL is expanded out into the appropriate number of rows and columns. Seeing as the function resides in a single cell you would only need to update that cell when you wanted to change the data. This means that you would no longer need to use a .gs file to remove old data and could instead complete everything from within Zapier. I have answered a question similar to this here, I describe how this is done within Zapier. The only prerequisite is that the data you are using is in either CSV or TSV format.