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Comment by escherize | Hacker News Reader

If there was a decent way to hook up databases to spread sheets we probably would use it at my 3 month old startup.

As it is, I opened a json endpoint so that Zapier can scrape our orders and fill it into the next-blank-line in a google doc.

Is there a better way to satisfy this use case?

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Hi, I'm a cofounder of Airtable. We have an alpha version of a Zapier integration, and also an API to directly push your order data into Airtable. The benefit of using Airtable over Google Sheets is that you get true database features without losing the speed and flexibility of a spreadsheet interface: foreign key linking, rich field types, multiple views, better collaboration and mobile access, etc.

In that past I've used postgres' ODBC driver to connect to my database from Excel. I've heard of (but never tried) Power Query, which may be a better way of directly doing that sort of thing without using Access to wire postgres to excel.

One solution you could do is use the Zapier webhook trigger to push data to google docs. Then write an application that iterates over the database table and fires a webhook with the JSON to that endpoint on Zapier.

Should be a piece of cake, but you'd definitely want to throttle the rate though to prevent yourself from being throttled. :-)

If your database is an MSSql server, you can connect to it through "data connections". Sort of works on a Mac, but only really on Windows (Might've improved with the latest version of Office for Mac though)

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