Apipheny Support

Apipheny Error

If you have an issue with Apipheny, 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 like an adblocker 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
6. Open a brand new Google Sheet and see if Apipheny works in the new sheet. If it does work in the new sheet, refresh your old sheet and try opening Apipheny again in the old sheet, after enabling it in the new sheet.

API Error

If you have an error from an API you’re trying to connect to, try taking these steps to troubleshoot the issue:

1. Check the API documentation to make sure you’ve entered your API request correctly
2. If you’re following our tutorial, make sure you’ve followed each step exactly and contact us if you notice anything out of date in our tutorial
3. Try making the same request using the Postman API Connector, to determine if the issue is related to Apipheny or not
4. Make sure you’ve entered your API key, or make sure you’ve authenticated your API request correctly
5. Error messages from the API will be displayed by Apipheny in red

If you’d like to let us know about an issue so we can investigate further, send a message to support AT apipheny DOT io

We’ll typically get back to you within a day or so.

Click here to install Apipheny and start your free 14-day trial. Try all of our features for free for 14 days. No credit card required.

After your trial, you can:

• Choose to continue on the free plan, which includes limited features.
• Upgrade to a paid plan for access to all features.

You won’t be automatically charged anything when your trial ends. When your trial ends, you will be converted to the free plan.

Upgrade

If you’re ready to upgrade, click here to choose a paid 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 a secure Stripe checkout portal.
• Refunds for any payment you make are available up to 7 days from the payment date, for any reason.

Manage your subscription

Click here to login and manage your account:

• change your subscription
• cancel your subscription
• update your payment method
• view your invoice history

Cancel your subscription

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

• Click here to login and cancel your subscription
• Reply to the automated invoice email we send you every month and let us know you would like to cancel your subscription

Error/issue opening Apipheny

If you open Apipheny and it is a blank white screen or you see an error message, 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.

Google has had an issue with being signed in to multiple accounts since 2017.

Brave Browser

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. More info:

• 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

Adblockers & Extensions

If you’re using extensions such as an adblocker, it may cause Apipheny not to work correctly.

API Request Errors

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.

Sometimes you might get an error saying you are in a banned location. Apipheny does not use unique or controllable IP addresses. Apipheny uses the Google Services IP addresses.

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

Requests not running

If you’re experiencing issues with the scheduling feature:

• Try quitting/closing Apipheny and opening Apipheny again
• Try deleting the scheduled request and then creating it again
• Try running the request manually from the Manage tab
• Try signing out of your google account and signing back in

If you run many requests or a request that returns many pages of data, you may run into Google’s service limits, as described here: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/services/quotas

Currently, free Google accounts get 20,000 URL Fetch calls per day, and paid Google Workspace accounts get 100,000 per day.

Google tracks each request as a URL Fetch. For example if you run a request that returns 10 pages, Google will count 10 URL Fetch calls towards your daily quota.

If you think you’ve hit your quota limits, try splitting your requests up into smaller requests spread over a longer period of time.

Click here for more info about our scheduling feature.

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

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

Below, under “API 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, send us a link to your software’s API documentation so we can take a look.

We are not experts in every single API but we know many of them and we’ll do what we can to connect yours 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 currently 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

It is possible to have queries trigger each other, one after the other. If this is what you’re looking for we discuss how to on our channel.

Today there is the option of using IF statements to look at existing data and when the value changes use the =APIPHENY formula.

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.

Cell Reference Example

You can replace values in your API URL, Headers, or POST Body with a variable. For example, this URL:

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.

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.

Privacy Policy

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 whether 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 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.

Yes, Apipheny works offline.

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 that was imported the next time you open your spreadsheet.

We recommend regularly backing up configuration with bulk query export. This comes from Configure Bulk Queries in the Sheets extension menu.

The same menu allows you to upload the queries into a new sheet should you need to recreate it.

Are there 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.

APIs come in a lot of different formats/structures and Apipheny parses some APIs better than other APIs.

In the future the goal is that every API parses perfectly and we want to implement features that help users customize and filter their API data imports, but these features are not ready yet.

In the mean time, the API endpoint might have some parameters that allow you to filter the results, or you can write a function/formula to help deal with empty rows.

Some people treat the sheet that the data is imported into as the “raw data” sheet and they use formulas to transfer only the data that they want into a different tab/sheet.

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
• modify request settings (includes Sheet Name)

Apipheny uses the same pool of IP addresses for Google Sheets that everyone else uses, and currently there is not a way to change or control that.

Google controls the IP addresses for services that run on Google, like the Google Sheets API, which Apipheny relies on.

You can obtain the Google IP address ranges here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/10026322?hl=en 

If you are experiencing any time out issues it is typically due to one of these reasons:

Google Limitations: you’re making too many API requests or you have too many scripts, addons, and formulas running in your google account. Every google account has a limit/quota when it comes to making requests.

Solution: make less API requests, deactivate other add-ons/scripts/formulas, etc.

API Issue: The API you’re using is experiencing technical issues or has degraded in performance, or too many people are trying to use the same API.

Solution: ask the API provider support and let them know about the issue you’re experience and see if they have any solutions

You can do further troubleshooting by making the same API requests using a tool such as postman.com to see if the same issue happens, to determine if it’s an issue with Apipheny.

You can also install Apipheny with a different google account (with a free trial) to determine if it’s an issue with your google account.