What is your goal?
make.com feels effectively useless when it comes to spreadsheets because as soon as you want to create scenarios that return multiple rows, every process on every action on every iteration turns into a token burn. How do people use it with tables so it’s actually efficient?
What is the problem & what have you tried?
I’ve got a few scenarios where I’m trying to use a huge google sheet as a data store and return results from it, usually ending up building arrays of 40-60 items and if you get one thing wrong in testing, it will eat up a month’s worth of tokens. At the moment I’m doing esoteric things in github to try and pre-process tables but I don’t see how make.com can be used for building business tools until it evaluates token usage when it comes to tables/spreadsheets.
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Hey,
If you could share a bit more detail about what you’re trying to do, it will be easier to suggest a solution.
But in general:
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You can pre-process things in your spreadsheet before importing to make (using appscript for example).
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If a receiving module can handle an array, then, of course, you can aggregate your data and map it as an array (for example, Google Sheets bulk add rows).
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You can use formulas to do the manipulation of data without extra modules.
Hope this helps.
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Welcome to the Make community!
Combining Bundles Using Aggregators
Every result/item from some module types (like Trigger / Iterator / List / Search / Match modules) can potentially and likely output more than one bundle. These multiple bundles will individually run subsequent modules once per bundle, which is not optimal in most cases:
- one operation per bundle per module, which could lead to…
- use of multiple credits per bundle per module (some modules use more than one credit)
View example screenshots
Aggregator Example
The “Search Rows” module runs one time, returning 999 results (999 bundles).
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Warning: |
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This can easily use your entire quota of credits if you are not careful or fail to understand this concept. |
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To “combine” multiple bundles into a single variable, so that you can process all of the items in a single operation, you’ll need to use an aggregator. Aggregators is a type of module that accumulates bundles and outputs one bundle (unless you are using “Group By”). An example of a commonly-used aggregator module is the Array aggregator module.
You can find out more about some other aggregator modules here:
Question: Which is the best aggregator do you think you’ll need for your use-case?
Setting the Correct Aggregator Source
You need to set the “Source Module” field of the aggregator to where the bundles are coming from. This is usually an iterator module, but can also be a search/list/repeater module, or even the trigger module!
Example
Here is an example of how your scenario could look like:
This is just an example. Your solution may or may not look like this depending on requirements and actual data.
For more information, see “Mapping with arrays” in the Help Centre. I also suggest going through the Make Academy, which also covers the use of Iterators & Aggregators.
— @samliew
P.S.: investing some effort into the tutorials in the Make Academy will save you lots of time and frustration using Make!
Hi @Matt_Graham ,
Could you please share more details about your scenario flow and module setup so we can pinpoint which module is generating a high number of operations?
Additionally, if any earlier modules are producing multiple operations, it’s usually more efficient to aggregate their output or process it as arrays. This approach can significantly reduce unnecessary operations and optimize your scenario’s performance.
Best regards,
Msquare Automation
Platinum Partner of Make
@Msquare_Automation
