Have you noticed the ETL (beta) option?

[Kirk_Masden]

Though I’m sure many of you knew this already, I didn’t so I’ll add that ETL stands for “extract, transform, load” and the new feature seems to allow us to import tables, though I haven’t tried it yet:

The tab is located inside of “Manage”.

[hru]

While I still don’t see it in my version of editor, this must be an upgrade that pending to reach all of users.

[Kirk_Masden]

That’s interesting. I wonder why you don’t see it. It is still in my editor. Did you tap on “Manage” and the look at the tabs?

[hru]

Yups, maybe just take times to get update to all users. Here is my tabs, few second ago.

[Lynn]

New features are not usually rolled out to everyone at once.

[WillowMobileSys]

Yep, I notices the ETL tab a few days back but it was just a “placeholder” - no functionality inside. I figured something was coming soon!

[Kirk_Masden]

Lynn:

New features are not usually rolled out to everyone at once.

Perhaps that part of the explanation for new features not being announced.

[Aleksi]

ETL is not yet released… so you need to wait for a while.

[WillowMobileSys]

But its in BETA right. It seems to be functional though I haven’t actually imported anything yet. Heck, I’ll try it right now!

[Aleksi]

I’m not able to confirm that because for me it’s working already

[Steve]

I had to lookup “ETL”, too. I’d never seen that acronym before. I feel like “Import” is more suitable for no-code, though.

[WillowMobileSys]

It worked!

There was a bug right out of the gate. I had a DateTime column where some rows were blank. The import reported that it couldn’t convert those to DateTime. Once I applied a DateTime to all rows, they were imported.

Now, I am left wondering where this will be useful? Is this just a step towards an automated feature we can utilize within our apps? Does the import run App Formulas as well?

It seems just as easy to copy paste between sheets. BUT, I can see the benefits if this is from a sheet to a database or the reverse!!

[Aleksi]

I tested it few days ago and it should calculate the app formula. Also… the initial value is calculated if the column is blank. And hope I’m remembering this correctly

[Kirk_Masden]

Hi @Steve! As I wrote, the ETL acronym was new to me. But, it seems that the term has come up in this community a few times in the past:

https://community.appsheet.com/search?q=etl

[Ami]

I have requested a feature like this a while back as a way to integrate with another application. I was told i should write a google script to do that. The problem with that was that app formulas would not work on the imported data.

[Grant_Stead]

So… what does this thing do?

[WillowMobileSys]

I haven’t checked it since I last posted. If its the same, the feature allows you to quickly and easily move data from one app into another without the need of touching the sheet. The capability of transferring Slice data is an especially nice touch!

[Lucinda_Mason]

Wonder if this would help with archiving data instead of going with google sheet scripting?

[WillowMobileSys]

Right now it seems the Import Data feature is a manual step. My hope is that in the future it can be accessed through a Workflow or Report to be automated.

Google scripting would allow this to be automated.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

If you want to automatically taking snapshot of data sitting on a table periodically, it is currently possible to run Appsheet API through report without involving Google App Script, for your guidance.
That should stands as “archiving” of data as of the time snapshot taken.