Transitioning my macros to Parabola

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Hey all,

I just discovered Parabola yesterday and I think it’s about to save me!

I hired two remote employees 2 weeks ago to help me with managing ad accounts (I run an agency) and we have used Excel macros for like 3 years. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware that these macros only worked on Windows and not Mac Excel, so there’s no way the 2 new hires can use them and the dev we use doesn’t have a mac to fix this. Consequently, they new hires are spending hours to do everything that takes me an hour max.

So now I’m playing around with Parabola, it feels like a life saver and so far I’d say it is around 75% of where I need these automations to be vs the macros.

But I’m wondering if the following can be achieved so we can pretty much duplicate the macros I use but make them even better in Parabola…

  1. I have a whitelist of ‘IDs’ in a separate Excel sheet that refer to specific advertising keywords (each keyword has a permanent unique ID) that I like to remove from the data everytime I do a weekly check. Is it possible to automate this in Parabola so that it removes any rows in the weekly check that contain any IDs from the whitelist?

  2. In my existing macro we have a % input which then filters the data ‘greater than or equal to’ our input. This varies from client to client. However, some of our clients sell different products and therefore they actually have different %'s so this blanket % isn’t always the best. I’d like to create a way so that Parabola can pull different %s for different products from an excel sheet and input them into the excel sheet of the weekly check, and then have Parabola filter ‘greater than or equal to’ these %s. Is this achievable?

  3. I’ve got some experience with using Carrd, Zapier and I’m also learning Bubble. I’d love to be able to build a dashboard with buttons for these processes, similar to what we have in Excel for the existing macros. I guess this is achievable with a file upload on Bubble which then triggers a webhook so that it triggers the Parabola workflow? Are there any specific tutorials anyone knows of for this?

Sorry for all the questions, it’s great to be here!

Kind Regards,

Calum

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Hi Calum,

Sounds like some great use cases for Parabola.

I recorded a Loom on how I’d approach these three issues. Unfortunately the quality of the video is terrible, but I think you can still get what you need from watching it.

Essentially:

  1. Yes. Connect two data sources (one being your exclusion list) to a “Find Overlap” step and Remove rows from your weekly check where the KW in the weekly check is the same as the KW in your exclusion list.

  2. I’m not sure what the percentages represent so it’s a bit hard to answer this one, but if you have a sheet that has a percentage for each row (each row being a product in your case), you can easily filter by the value in the percentage column by using a “Filter” step.

  3. I’d recommend that instead of webhooks you use an email trigger for the flow. With an email trigger, you can send an email with a CSV/Excel attachment and pull in that data into the flow as a data source. And the flow will run whenever it gets one of those emails.

In your case, your devs could upload an Excel file to Bubble (with the file uploader in Bubble) and then click a button to trigger the flow, where the flow would perform its operations with the data uploaded in Bubble.

To get the button to trigger the flow, you’d set up a workflow in bubble like this:

-When button is clicked, send email to [email address that Parabola generates for your email trigger] and attach the file that is “File Uploader”'s value.

Hope that helps and let me know if you have any other questions!

Brian Dawson
Automation Consultant

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