I’m working with Google Sheets API and need to find the row that contains the maximum value in a particular column, then remove that entire row from the sheet.
I’ve been trying different approaches but can’t get it to work properly. Here’s what I have so far:
quick tip - make sure to handle empty cells in that column first or you’ll get errors. I use filter(None, column_data) to remove blanks before finding max value, otherwise the api throws weird exceptions when comparing mixed types.
I struggled with a similar issue a few months back and found that working with row indices is key here. Your current approach with col_values(8)[-1:] only gets the last value, not the maximum. What worked for me was getting all values from column 8, finding the index of the maximum value, then using delete_rows() to remove it. Here’s the pattern I used: get the column values with col_values(8), use Python’s max() and index() functions to find the position of the highest value, then call delete_rows(row_index + 1) since Google Sheets uses 1-based indexing while Python uses 0-based. Just remember to account for your header row if you have one - that threw me off initially and I was deleting the wrong rows.
When dealing with duplicate maximum values, you need to be careful about which row gets deleted. I ran into this exact scenario last year and learned that the standard approach only removes the first occurrence. Here’s what I implemented: after getting all column values with col_values(), I used enumerate to track both values and their positions, then filtered for the maximum value. The tricky part is handling the API call efficiently - I found that using batch_update() works better than delete_rows() for this operation since it reduces API calls. Also worth noting that if your sheet has formulas or references to the deleted row, they might break, so consider using update() to clear the row content first rather than deleting it entirely. This approach preserved my sheet structure while achieving the same result.