parsing gmail message automatically and inserting results into google spreadsheet

Question

A colleague of mine is a small builder here in London. He works all over town. He uses many different suppliers.

Most suppliers send him their sales invoice via email when he buys something.

My friend could set up a gmail address to be used only by suppliers. But could emails sent to it be "automagically" processed and their contents inserted into a google spreadsheet ?

What is the relative practicality of what I've outlined ?

Tom

depends on what you actually want to process. I don't know what exactly is required here. If you are trying to manage the pipeline, you could check out Streak — Konstant
– Konstant, Commented Apr 11, 2014 at 15:33
the problems lie with the merchants in the first place. They do not reliably put sales info in the body of their emails: often it's only in an attachment. I'm not clear how you'd parse an attachment. IFTTT provide a script that generates a google spreadsheet entry when a gmail arrives whose subject line contains the word 'order' or 'receipt'. The entry includes a hyperlink to the merchant's attachment. — Tom
– Tom, Commented Apr 12, 2014 at 20:43
Parsing the attachment will naturally depend on the type of attachment. According to me (and my knowledge is limited), you will need to write scripts to parse the attachment and populate the spreadsheet accordingly. Are the attachments, PDF files? Are they scanned? I am asking this, because extracting text from an image (say scanned image) is completely different than extracting text from a computer generated PDF (which can be parsed for text). — Konstant
– Konstant, Commented Apr 13, 2014 at 16:09
The attached sales invoices are PDFs in the majority of cases. I wonder if Google Drive includes apps that will parse a PDF somehow, or derive a useful text file. Somewhat sketchily, I imagine a workflow that uploads the attachment to Drive where some app extracts useful text which is then available (somehow) for insertion into a spreadsheet. — Tom
– Tom, Commented Apr 13, 2014 at 22:03

Konstant · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-14 01:43:03Z

1

So, your query finally boils down to two questions:

Save PDF attachments from Inbox to Google Drive
Parse PDFs and store the data into google spreadsheet

Save PDF attachments

This can be easily achieved by processing the attachments from the emails and storing them google drive. This link will help you achieve the same. Kindly go through the script provided in the sheet for better understanding.

Parse PDF attachments

After storing the PDFs in google drive, you could easily retrieve the content via Document Class using method getBlob or getBody as per your requirement and store in google spreadsheets.

answered Apr 14, 2014 at 1:43

Konstant

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Druvision · Accepted Answer · 2017-12-26 09:49:26Z

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Yesterday I've used mailpareser to parse an order email and create a google spreadsheet raw for each line item in the order. So this is now automatic.

I've found this question with google so it's still relevent.

answered Dec 26, 2017 at 9:49

Druvision

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