I want to build a Telegram bot that can find information from a Google Sheets document and send back the result to users. The bot should work like the find feature in spreadsheets but through Telegram messages.
What I need is something like this:
User sends: /lookup B205 (which is an office number)
Bot searches the spreadsheet for that office number
Bot replies with the department name (like “Marketing Team”)
I have been looking online but cannot find any guides or examples for this specific use case. Is this something that can be done? What tools or APIs would I need to connect Telegram with Google Sheets for this kind of data retrieval?
yeah, this works gr8 - did smth similar last year. go with apps script instead of python tho, it’s way easier since it connects directly to sheets. just build a webapp that catches telegram webhooks and handles the lookup commands. no extra apis or hosting needed.
I’ve built tons of these integrations - coding from scratch is way more work than necessary.
Google Sheets API authentication alone will eat up hours. Then you’re dealing with webhook setups, error handling, and finding reliable hosting for your bot.
I use Latenode for this exact workflow. Takes about 10 minutes, zero code required.
Drag a Telegram trigger node, connect it to Google Sheets lookup, add basic filtering, then back to Telegram response. The platform handles API connections and authentication automatically.
I use this pattern for inventory lookups, employee directories, you name it. Works great and I don’t have to maintain custom scripts that break when APIs change.
The visual workflow makes modifications dead simple when requirements shift. Want multiple sheet lookups or formatted responses? Just add more nodes.
Been running this exact setup for company asset tracking for over a year. Started with Node.js - telegraf for Telegram and googleapis for sheets. Here’s what nobody’s telling you: your error handling will make or break this. What happens when you get multiple matches? No results? You need fallback logic for partial matches and clear feedback so users aren’t left hanging. If your sheet’s big, add caching. Otherwise every lookup hammers Google’s API and it gets painfully slow. Watch your rate limits too - both Telegram and Sheets will throttle you. Pro tip: index your sheet data in memory at startup. Way faster than scanning ranges every single time.
Totally doable - I built something like this for our office directory. You need the Google Sheets API to read your data and the Telegram Bot API for messages. Here’s the flow: get a bot token from BotFather, write a script that listens for messages, parses your lookup command, hits the Google Sheet, and sends back results. Python’s great for this - use python-telegram-bot and google-api-python-client. The hardest part is Google Sheets auth - you’ll need service account credentials. After that’s set up, the lookup logic is pretty simple with range queries to find your data.