Technical Notes

Header rows

MESA uses the first row of your spreadsheet as the header row. To avoid issues retrieving columns and running workflows, please ensure that your header row:

• Does not contain duplicates. If more than one column contains the same column header, then MESA cannot send data over correctly.

• Does not have missing headers. If so, MESA cannot retrieve your Sheet's columns. Make sure that each column that should contain information has a header.

Hidden rows

Before configuring MESA and running workflows, please unhide any hidden rows in your spreadsheet.

Columns aren't returning values

Sometimes, when Google Sheets is unsure of the type of data that your column contains, it will not be able to return certain column values. For example, this column begins with numeric values for the first few rows. When it gets to the last row, Google expects a number and will not pass the text "Smith" to MESA.

In these instances, select the column and specify the column type. In this instance, selecting Plain Text allowed the values to pass to MESA:

Operation timed out error

Sometimes, workflows that have Google Sheets actions will experience the following errors:

• Operation timed out after 30011 milliseconds with 0 bytes received\

  
• Error from Google Sheets API: The service is currently unavailable.\

  

Both of these errors are related to Google Sheets' API not functioning correctly. Unfortunately, since we cannot control Google's API processing, these errors can occur randomly and do not reflect the workflow or MESA behaving incorrectly.

To navigate these errors when they occur, the best approach is to replay them. Doing this will re-run the task that failed and (most of the time) will allow the task to be processed successfully.

You can manually replay the task from the Activity tab in the workflow or set the error handling on your Google Sheets step to automatically replay failed tasks once so that you don't have to manually make updates each time.