Apipheny Support

If you have an issue, or if the add-on is not working correctly, try taking these steps to troubleshoot the issue:

1. Try closing the add-on (clicking the x button) and opening it again
2. Try refreshing the webpage
3. Try using an incognito browser
4. Try using a different browser – sometimes a browser extension can cause issues. Privacy browsers like Brave can also cause issues
5. Sign out of other accounts – sometimes google services can have an issue if you’re signed in to multiple google accounts. Try signing out of your other google accounts, or sign in to 1 google account in a different browser

If you’d like to let us know about an issue so we can investigate further, send us a message by clicking on the chat icon in the bottom right corner of this page.

• Please note we are increasing the price of our monthly, yearly, and lifetime plans in June/July. Purchase a monthly, yearly, or lifetime subscription before the price increase to be locked in to that rate.

When you install Apipheny, you’ll get a free 30 day trial. Once the 30 days expire, we ask you to subscribe to an annual, monthly, or lifetime subscription plan.

You will not be automatically charged when the trial ends. You have to manually enter your credit card information.

If you don’t want to use Apipheny anymore, you can uninstall it and unsubscribe from our emails.

Payments are submitted in the add-on using a secure Stripe checkout.

Refunds are available up to 30 days from the payment date, for any reason.

When you become a paid user, you have unlimited access to use the add-on.

You can make unlimited API requests (within Google’s limits) and you can use the add-on in as many sheets as you want.

If price is of concern to you, please email us so we can provide you with alternate options.

Cancellation

If you want to cancel your subscription, you can either:

• contact us in the chat window down below and let us know you would cancel your subscription, and let us know the email address of your account
• OR reply to the automated invoice email we send you every month and let us know you would like to cancel your subscription

Optional: in your message to us, specify whether you want to cancel your subscription immediately or at the end of the current billing period. If possible, please also list your reason for cancelling your subscription so we can improve our product.

In the future, we will have an account management tab in the add-on, where you can view and modify your subscription, but this feature is not ready yet. We will make an announcement when it is ready.

Here are the latest updates with Apipheny.

Roadmap

• [SOLVED] There is a known bug with special characters. If your API URL has special characters and you are having an issue, try encoding the special characters and try again. Contact us if you continue to have issues and let us know what API URL you’re using. We are working to resolve these issues.
• [SOLVED] We have implemented a fix to handle recent billing issues. Please let us know if you experience any issues related to billing or making payments.

January 2022

• [SOLVED] We have implemented a fix to handle recent scheduling misconfiguration errors. If you are having an issue, make sure you are the owner of the spreadsheet and try closing and opening apipheny again to reset the scheduled triggers. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you are still not getting the desired outcomes with your scheduled requests.

When you purchase our lifetime deal on appsumo.com, you have to complete some steps to redeem and activate your lifetime subscription.

1. In your Appsumo Dashboard, find your purchased deals
2. Next to your purchased Apipheny deal, click the “Redeem” button
3. Follow the steps to redeem and activate your lifetime code

Your lifetime subscription is not automatically activated when you purchase it on Appsumo, you have to click Redeem and follow the steps to activate it.

If you run an API request and an error comes back within the spreadsheet (in the cells of your sheet), this is most likely an error coming back from the API itself

For example you might get an error message saying that the load/volume of people trying to access the API is too high and to wait before trying to make another request. Or you might get an error saying your access is denied either because you did not enter your API key correctly into apipheny or you don’t have an API key, etc.

For any error you don’t understand, just message us for assistance and in the message include a screenshot of the error message.

If you open Apipheny and it is a blank white screen, it’s probably because you’re signed in to multiple Google accounts.

To fix the issue, sign out of your other Google accounts and try again, or use an incognito browser, or use a different browser.

Every app that Google approves must go through a strict security & privacy approval process, including ours. When you first install the add-on, you’ll be asked to allow access to three basic permissions that are required for the add-on to work properly.

Our code can only access your data while you’re accessing the add-on. We don’t sync your data to our own servers and we don’t have any direct access to your data. We use Google’s PropertyService which allows us to attach limited data (such as saved API requests) to the spreadsheet itself and to the user, on Google’s servers.

We then use Google Apps Script which runs exclusively on Google servers.

We do not have access to view any of the information stored in your Sheets or any of your saved API information.

Your saved API information gets deleted when you uninstall the add-on.

Privacy Policy

Every API is different, so there’s not a single way to connect every API using our software.

Below, under “Tutorials”, you’ll see guides we’ve created for connecting various APIs to Google Sheets using Apipheny, and we’re creating more guides all the time.

If you need help connecting a specific API to Google Sheets, just send us a link to your software’s API documentation so we can take a look.

Then we’ll follow up with specific instructions on connecting your API to Google Sheets.

You can use Apipheny to automatically refresh the API data in your Google Sheet every hour, day, week, or month.

You can learn more about our scheduling feature here.

We don’t have faster refreshing than every hour because Google limits add-ons to update only once per hour at most, as you can see here: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/triggers/installable#time-driven_triggers

“Note that an add-on can use a time-driven trigger once per hour at most.” -Google

No add-on is allowed to refresh faster than once per hour, according to Google.

If Google changes this policy in the future, then we will be happy to add faster refreshing than every hour. But it is currently not possible.

If you would like to try a workaround, you can write a macro or script that force updates the =APIPHENY formula as often as you’d like. For example, by deleting the formula and pasting it again.

Google Sheets has limits and Google also has limits when using APIs and other services such as formulas and scripts.

Google API usage limits:

• 20,000 API calls per day
• 6 mins processing time per hour
• 90 mins processing time per day
• 50 mb per call

Click here for info on Google service quotas.

A google user’s quota can be limited based on the combined amount of activity from things such as scripts, addons, and formulas (eg. GOOGLEFINANCE).

These quotas, when maxed out, can interfere with Apipheny and cause scheduled requests to fail.

—

Google Sheets limits:

• Up to 10 million cells per spreadsheet
• 40,000 new rows max
• 18,278 columns max
• 200 tabs max per spreadsheet
• 1,000 GoogleFinance formulas max per sheet
• 50 cross-workbook reference formulas max (eg. ImportRange formulas)
• 50 functions for external data max (eg. ImportData, ImportHtml, ImportFeed, ImportXml)
• 50,000 characters maximum string length

Date

If you need the current date as a parameter in your API request, you can call the TODAY formula in a cell of your google sheets (https://www.google.com/search?q=current+date+formula+google+sheets) and then reference that cell in your API URL (https://apipheny.io/reference-cell-value-api-request/).

Time

If your API call requires a timestamp, add one of these formulas in a cell of your Google Sheet:

• =(now()-5.5/24-DATE(1970,1,1))*86400000

• =TEXT(now(),”yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss”)

Try the second formula if the first one does not work.

Then reference the cell’s value in your API URL.

Example

https://api.example.com?time=timestamp

Would become:

https://api.example.com?time={{{Sheet1!A1}}}

So the API request would use the value in Sheet 1 cell A1 (where the timestamp formula is pasted) when calling the API.

Click here for more info about referencing cells in Google Sheets.

If you’re using Brave Browser, and Apipheny is not working correctly, try turning off your adblockers, or if you’re using Brave, turn off “Shields” to help troubleshoot the issue.

• https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022973471-What-is-Shields-
• https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022806212-How-do-I-use-Shields-while-browsing-
• https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023646212-How-do-I-configure-global-and-site-specific-Shields-settings-
• https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/categories/360001053072-Shields

If you have a local JSON file on your computer, here’s how you can “upload” that JSON file into Google Sheets using Apipheny:

1. Upload the JSON file to Google Drive

2. Obtain the sharing link & share for “anyone with the link”

3. Use this website to generate a direct download link (API key not required for small files): https://www.wonderplugin.com/online-tools/google-drive-direct-link-generator/

4. Use Apipheny to GET the JSON (use the direct link from step 3 as the URI path)

Is Apipheny software GDPR or HIPAA compliant?

We at Apipheny do not have access to any of your data, only Google does, so you have to check if Google is GDPR/HIPAA compliant.

Apipheny software is hosted on Google servers, and all of your data passes through and is stored on Google Servers. There is no code in Apipheny that sends your data to a server we can access, so we don’t have access to any of your data.

We recommend looking into Google GDPR or HIPAA compliancy for your country to confirm.

Can I purchase 1 lifetime subscription and use it for 2 or more Google accounts?

Apipheny licenses are assigned to unique gmail accounts.

Accounts without a subscription that have access to a spreadsheet owned by the subscribed user will be able to see the results of data requests that the subscribed user makes.

If both accounts want to be able to open and modify settings in the add-on, then each account should have it’s own paid subscription.

If you want to use Apipheny with a different email address, send an email to support@apipheny.io from your current email address requesting to change to your new email address and we will process the change shortly.

You can change the Target sheet after you save the API request.

First, enter your API request details in the Import tab.

Then click the Save button at the bottom of the Import tab

You will then be brought to the Manage tab where you will see your saved API request.

In the Manage tab, click on the API request you saved to edit/modify it.

In the edit screen, you will see the option to change the Sheet Name, which is the target/output sheet.

More info: saving API requests in Apipheny

Yes, Apipheny and Google Sheets both work in the cloud so you can close your browser and turn off your computer and your scheduled requests will still run when you are not present.

You will see any new data the next time you open your spreadsheet.

If there are empty/blank rows in your sheet after you import API data:

When you scroll to the right side of the sheet, is there values in the “blank” rows that are causing those rows to appear?

Sometimes there might not be values in the visible columns, but if you scroll to the right side of the sheet you may see those “blank” rows actually have values in them.