Monitor a local (or Google Drive) folder, extract the title and content of the PDF file that appeared in the folder then separate the content into Google Sheets columns. Is this possible?

Questions
1

Hello!

Has anyone tried and succeeded in developing a workflow similar to the following steps:

  1. Monitor a local (or Google Drive) folder.
  2. Extract the title and content of the PDF file that appeared in the folder.
  3. Separate the content into Google Sheets columns.

Thank you for your help and attention!

I’m sorry for any inconvenience!

2

Welcome to the community @dcbn

This can be done with the Local File trigger or Google Drive trigger. Did you try that?

You can use the Google Drive node to download the file that changed and the trigger provides the title.

We have a Read PDF node that you can use to try to map the data to Google Sheets columns (Using the Google Sheets node). If that does not work you might need to use a dedicated service to extract the PDF content, something like AWS Textract. It depends on how complex is the PDF you want to read.

1 Like
3

Hello!

Thank you for your reply and your attention!

I’m sorry that I didn’t state what I’ve tested before, I thought would be better to just ask If the workflow I was idealizing was possible.

Not yet.

Initially, I started using the “Read PDF” workflow (that contains the “Read Binary File”), but when I tried using the “Read Binary Files”, I couldn’t achieve the same result as when using the “Read Binary File”.

The “Read PDF” worked well considering It outputs the text inside the PDF, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to “copy” the result to another place (like a Google Sheet) or something like that.

What would be the most feasible approach to achieve this?

Should I just add a Google Sheet node to append the data into the sheet?

Thank you for your help and attention!

I’m sorry for any inconvenience!