I would like to retrieve and use data from a spreadsheet in a shortcut. Numbers doesn’t seem to have that option.
Imagine a spreadsheet with email addresses in column A and first names in column B. In my shortcut I want to send all people an email and use firstname in it.
I know how to repeat each and send emails, but I don’t know how to retrieve and use data from a spreadsheet. Do you?
Are you running this on a Mac? If so, have you considered using AppleScript to retrieve the data?
If you are not necessarily running this on a Mac have you thought of switching to a different file format (e.g. CSV), or a different data storage/maintenance option entirely to give you the data access options in Shortcuts that you are looking for?
Honestly, I don’t know where to start. I want an automation in my iOS shortcuts that works similar to Google Sheets in Zapier: find rows and add/extract data in/from rows
First of all decide if you actually want to use Shortcuts for a specific reason. It sounds like you want to do a mail merge to email or a mailing list, or a contact group. There are a variety of options and solutions to thew and there is no real context to base any advice on.
You are starting from a point of wanting to do something that is unsupported, but we don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle to understand the underlying requirements that got you to that point.
If you do need Shortcuts, knowing what devices you want to run the Shortcut from gives us insight into what additional scripting, tools, and apps you may be able to tap into.
The use of Numbers is obviously quite limiting for Shortcuts use directly - the irony for Apple products. But there are alternative file formats, ways of storing sync’d data, or even data online.
One could even ask… could Zapier send the emails for me from a Google Sheet? Could a Google App script create a draft in Gmail for me from a sheet and a template?
Hopefully you now have some ideas of where to start and what you need to figure out and ask about based on that.