Google Sheets: what this connector can do

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What this page is for

docs/connectors/google-sheets.md is the setup guide for whoever runs your organisation's Botseon deployment — creating the vendor application and entering its credentials. This page is the other half: what Google Sheets actually lets a bot do once it is connected to your account, what it asks you for along the way, its limits, and how to take the connection away again, in Botseon and at Google.

Read and edit cells in spreadsheets you can edit.

Google Sheets is its own plugin, beside Google Drive: Drive finds and opens files (a Sheet read through Drive comes back as text, one CSV per tab), and Sheets reads and edits the cells. You can add either one without the other.

What a bot can do with it

Read — Google Sheets tells a bot things, nothing changes

ToolWhat it does
google-sheets.get_spreadsheetRead a spreadsheet’s title and its tabs, with how many rows and columns each has.
google-sheets.read_rangeRead the cells in a range, such as Budget!A1:D20, as rows of text.

Write — Google Sheets lets a bot change things

ToolWhat it does
google-sheets.update_cellsWrite values into the cells of a range, as if typed; a value starting with = is a formula.
google-sheets.append_rowsAdd rows after the last row of a table in a tab, as if typed.

Every write waits for your approval, and the card names the range it will change, such as Costs!B2:C3.

The permissions it asks for, in plain words

Every call a bot makes through this connector is tagged with what kind of thing it is. Only the tags below ever apply here — a tag this connector's tools never carry is not listed, because it can never ask you for it.

  • read — Looks something up. Nothing changes, and nothing is sent anywhere. A bot never has to ask first for this.
  • write — Changes something inside the connected account — creates, edits or files something. Asks you first, unless you have told Botseon to always allow that exact action.

When you connect it, Google asks you to let Botseon see your spreadsheets (reading only), or see and edit them (reading and writing) — whichever you chose on the plugin sheet. It never asks for access to the rest of your Drive.

Limits

Read and edit cells in spreadsheets you can edit. Nothing outside that list is possible through this connector, however a bot is asked to use it: it does not create, share, rename or delete a spreadsheet, and it does not add or remove tabs.

  • View-only stays view-only. A spreadsheet shared with your Google account as a viewer or a commenter can be read but never changed. If a bot tries, Google refuses, nothing in the spreadsheet changes, and the bot tells you: "This spreadsheet is view-only for the connected Google account, so I did not change it. Ask its owner for edit access, then try again."
  • Protected ranges stay protected. A range its owner protected is refused the same way, with its own sentence.
  • One write is at most 10,000 cells, so an approval stays something you can actually read.

Google Sheets is also only ever as wide as the scopes your organisation's connected app actually requests — the exact scopes are on the operator's own setup page, docs/connectors/google-sheets.md, because narrowing or widening them is a decision for whoever runs your deployment, not for this page.

Disconnecting

In Botseon

Open Plugins from the sidebar, press this connector's card to open its detail page, and under Accounts press Remove next to the account — or Uninstall to remove the plugin and every account connected to it at once. Either one revokes the stored connection immediately: nothing more is read or changed through it from that moment on. Install a plugin walks through the same screen step by step.

At Google

Removing the account in Botseon also asks Google to revoke the token, when this deployment's connector is configured with a revoke URL. Confirm the grant is actually gone by opening Google's own account settings — the connected-apps, security or authorised-apps page covers it — and removing Botseon there too if it still shows up. That is also where you can revoke access without going through Botseon at all, which is worth knowing if you ever lose access to your Botseon account.

What Botseon keeps, and how your data is used

Whatever a bot reads or writes through this connector becomes part of your conversations and the record of that run — the same records, and the same retention schedule, as everything else a bot works on. Botseon is the processor for that content; your organisation decides what it may read and remember, and can delete it sooner than the schedule would on its own.

Your data is sent to a model provider only to produce the bot's answer, and for nothing else — it is not used to train any model. The Privacy Policy's Models and How long we keep it sections have the full detail, including exactly how long each kind of record is kept for.

See also

Last verified against build b98ac7c.