Troubleshooting: Google Sheets source

Most common issues with Google Sheets source 

"Internal error encountered" - Google API 500 error

"Timeout: we could not import your data within 9 minutes" error

Dates are imported as text

Google 400 error. The server cannot process the request because it is malformed. Sign in is required.

Google API 500 error "Internal error encountered"

Please find the troubleshooting steps here: "Internal error encountered" - Google API 500 error

Timeout: we could not import your data within 9 minutes

Please find the troubleshooting steps here: Timeout for Google Sheets source

Dates are imported as text

If a date in the source data is in a custom format and contains String values (i.e. day of the week (Mon)), it is saved as a String, not a date:

  1. Thursday, January 14, 2021 - Ok.
  2. 2021-01-06 - Ok.
  3. 10-Jan-2021 - Ok.
  4. 2020-05-12 (Tue) - not Ok.

There are several approaches to follow:

Approach 1

Do not set up "2020-05-12 (Tue)" custom format in the source file, use the date format without a day of the week instead (we tested "yyyy/mm/dd" and "yyyy-mm-dd" and both work fine). Then apply any of these solutions to get the needed format in the destination:

  • Set up the needed date format in the destination file (once applied, further data re-imports will not override the format in the destination)
  • Add a formula-based custom column in Coupler.io to convert the date to the needed format. In our example, the formula will be DATETIME_FORMAT({Date},'YYYY-MM-DD (ddd)'). Hide the original column in the unneeded format.

Approach 2

If changing the format in the source file is not possible, keep the import as-is (with a string field), and add a formula in your destination file to the left of the imported dataset* to get a column with values in a proper date format:

b7108475a32aaa598795eabb601dc88d.png

Formula example for this custom data format : =DATE(LEFT(B2,4),MID(B2,6,2),MID(B2,9,2))

*Formulas must be added to the left of the imported dataset, unless a specific destination cell range is used in Coupler.io settings, so that data is not over-written after data re-imports.

See help materials here:

Google 400 error. The server cannot process the request because it is malformed. Sign in is required.

Please find the troubleshooting steps here:

Troubleshooting: Google 400 error. The server cannot process the request because it is malformed. Sign in is required.


To see the most common issues with Google Sheets destination, please visit the article  Troubleshooting: Google Sheets destination

Did this answer your question? Thanks for the feedback There was a problem submitting your feedback. Please try again later.