Translating Large Excel Files: Managing API Call Volume and Runtime Limits in MAKE Automation

How To
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Hello everyone,

I’m currently working on an automation scenario in MAKE to translate a large French product spreadsheet (30000 products with 6 columns) using the Chatgpt in Make with Excel. However, I’ve run into a significant issue:

Running the scenario on the entire spreadsheet will require roughly 180,000 OpenAI API calls, which is a considerable amount. The processing time for this volume of calls exceeds the runtime limits, causing the scenario to time out after 40 minutes.

Here’s a summary of the challenges:

  1. API Call Volume: Approximately 180,000 API calls are needed to translate the entire spreadsheet.

  2. Scenario Runtime Limits: The process takes too long, resulting in a timeout after 40 minutes.

  3. Manual Intervention: To process the entire file, significant manual intervention is required, which is not feasible for our needs.

I am looking for advice or solutions on how to handle this. Specifically:

• Are there any best practices or techniques within MAKE to manage such large volumes of API calls without hitting the runtime limits?

• Would breaking down the process into smaller chunks be effective, and if so, how would you recommend structuring this?

• Alternatively, if someone has experience implementing a similar process with a Python script, I would greatly appreciate any guidance or instructions on how to set this up. Do you believe a script is better in this case?

Additionally, we anticipate facing the same hard-limit problem when scraping large websites. Any insights or suggestions on handling these scenarios would be highly beneficial.

Thank you in advance for your help!

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Hi @Jean_charles_Salvin,

That sounds like quite the challenge, indeed. My first thought is, does each single cell need to be translated separately?

Have you tried to search for purpose-built alternatives, such as Deepl? Translate Excel files easily and accurately with DeepL

Cheers,
Henk

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You could have a new column to track the progress of the translation, and process the spreadsheet in batches of rows (for those rows that doesn’t have translation yet).

samliew – request private consultation

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