I want to transfer tables keeping their values and formatting intact among google docs , google sheets and google slides. is that possible?
I want to automate this task using the chat trigger node where i will tell him which spreadsheet to choose the table from and it will transfer that table either google docs with page number or google slides with slide no , keeping the values and formatting intact. this can be vice versa too like i have a table in google docs and i want to transfer it to google sheets . This table should be dynamic so that change in one place is needed to be reflected on all of this linked copies
Looks like a challenge.
Did you try to implement any part of it? Like e.g. tables transfer with formatting retained.
You may want to repost your ask in Help me Build my Workflow - n8n Community
i tried using a chat trigger node and connected an information extractor and text classifier to decide if it is google sheets to doc/slide , google docs to sheet/slide , google slides to doc/sheet and information extractor node to extract the name of the source and destination for the transfer of table and i tried to find the common format for table which is supported by google docs , sheet and slides but couldnt find any common format among them , chatgpt said html snippet but doesnt seem to work, this workflow is still incomplete
anyone please help. thank you
I can be wrong but I think chances for you to get help on such an endeavor are thin.
Here is why (IMHO).
There is no n8n nodes that would ready to perform what you ask out of the box. So you (or a helper) would need to know or, more likely, research Google API for Sheets (the easiest of three), Docs and Slides to create a whole library (even three libraries, one per each type of the document) to manipulate the tables transformations, formatting, and substitution in a target document. The effort may be well spent in vain (and effectively killing motivation) as Google APIs often do not offer endpoints on every action that may be required and look automatable because are “easily” doable via web ui.
This is the development effort that goes beyond the domain of knowledge of n8n.
Maybe even n8n is not a right or sufficient tool for this. I would be more comfortable using google app script (if not a “normal” backend service) for gapps is better suited for complex Google apis integrations (its native after all).
So your best options, if you want to have this implemented within some reasonable time frames, to dig into all this stuff yourself or try to find someone willing to invest their time into your cause on n8n discord.
Sorry, if the above is something you didn’t want to be broken to you. I can be well wrong in any and every statement.
its okay i dont mind . infact thank you for all the clarity you gave me regarding this. is there anyway other than n8n to automate this? or anything similar?
any kind of help / advice / suggestion is welcome
anyone? any tips / help?
First… ideas:
- Investigate linking / embedding (via http references) instead of syncing/converting, especially for the presentation (Slides) part of it. You may need to use a “publish” function on the item/object being linked.
- Investigate automatic conversions offered on each technology with its import or export functions (if any are available).
- Identify one “original/authored copy” for anything you wish to convert, and never try to convert back into that system/format / always convert from that system/format, and make updates/changes to the content only in that “original” copy.
Next… more opinion/commentary about attempting to do conversions, in n8n or otherwise:
Even between Google Sheets and Excel, two very similar tools, there are enough differences in capabilities that it would be impossible to convert everything. For instance, this mentions that Google Sheets doesn’t support merged cells, among other things.
Converting between a spreadsheet and a table-embedded-in-a-presentation (Slides) would have an even more significant incompatibility matrix.
If you were to use some commonly used encoding (JSON/YAML/XML) as the “middle” format, to some extent it might be possible to export/import the “common denominator” aspects of a simple grid/tabular data display (i.e. those things supported in all contexts), which could include (maybe):
- the data values themselves (not formulas or references)
- a font-family (but probably not a specific font name)
- whether a cell/row/column is a header or not
- simple modifiers for the display of particular cells/rows/columns (e.g. bold or italic).
- relative sizes (e.g. column display percentage, but nothing absolute)
However, this implies a self-imposed authoring restriction to only those commonly supported features in any of the tools (probably not realistic).
Beyond that, you would probably be, as Olek said, endeavoring to write some significant conversion software. And, to “keep everything in sync” means you would have to implement something to externally track all of the linkages and respond to updates (triggers), AND somehow short-circuit endless triggering loops.
In the past, there have been attempts to do this sort of thing in a much more limited context / “closed system” and although they were used for a while, eventually those technologies were more or less abandoned because they were too much to maintain, or it was too difficult (impossible) to keep them working. The tendency of commercial software companies to differentiate features to capture/lock-in customers will probably always win out over cooperation and common standards.
I would be interested to see it if you get even a subset of what you described to work. Everyone seems to want to take on a few “Sisyphus’ boulder” technical challenges in their lives. Will this be one of yours?
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i did try to use the common format between them as a medium of transfer but only the values were preserved not the format . the format and layout got wrecked after the transfer making the whole data useless. i guess maybe scripts are only option
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