Google Sheets

What it is

A Google Sheets connection lets workflows read rows from and append rows to spreadsheets. There are three ways to authenticate, and the choice matters more than it first appears: it decides who owns the access and what happens when that person leaves.

Before you start

Decide between a person's access and a service account. A connection authorized by signing in acts as that person and can reach exactly the spreadsheets they can; when their account is disabled, the connection stops working. A service account has its own identity, and only sees spreadsheets that have been shared with its address.

Setup fields

These are the fields the guided setup collects — both the Add integration form and the setup card Barry raises in chat. Additional settings live on the connection's settings page once it exists.

Connection settings

Field	Type	Required	Secret	Notes
name	Text	Yes	No	Display name for this connection. This is what you pick from in a workflow node.
authMethod	Choice	Yes	No	How Honeybase authenticates to Google — sign in through Honeybase, use your own OAuth client, or use a service account.

Credentials

This integration has 3 credential options. You supply the fields for the one you pick.

Sign in with Google through Honeybase

The quickest option. You approve access in a Google consent screen and Honeybase holds the OAuth client; nothing to create in Google Cloud.

No credential fields are collected for this option in the guided setup.

Your own Google OAuth client

Your organization's own OAuth client, so consent, branding and revocation stay in your Google Cloud project. Access is still granted by a person signing in, and inherits that person's access to each spreadsheet.

Field	Type	Required	Secret	Notes
auth.clientId	Text	Yes	No	The OAuth client ID from your Google Cloud project, ending in .apps.googleusercontent.com.
auth.clientSecret	Password	Yes	Yes	The OAuth client secret issued alongside that client ID, from the same Credentials page.

Google service account

A non-human identity that belongs to no one's account. The right choice for unattended automation — nothing breaks when someone leaves — but each spreadsheet must be shared with the service account's address explicitly.

Field	Type	Required	Secret	Notes
auth.serviceAccountJson	JSON	Yes	Yes	The service account key file, pasted whole. Google gives you this JSON once, at key creation, and will not show it again.

Configured after the connection exists

The guided setup does not ask for OAuth scopes. Open the connection on the Integrations page to change them.

Sign in through Honeybase

Choose it, approve the Google consent screen in the popup, and you are done. The consent window opens as a popup rather than a full-page redirect so an in-progress chat or form is not lost.

Your own OAuth client

Use this when consent should show your organization's name, or when policy requires the OAuth client to live in your own Google Cloud project.

1. In the Google Cloud console, pick a project and enable the Google Sheets API under APIs & Services → Library.
2. Configure the OAuth consent screen for your organization.
3. Under APIs & Services → Credentials, choose Create Credentials → OAuth client ID, type Web application.
4. Add the redirect URI Honeybase shows on the setup form to Authorized redirect URIs.
5. Copy the client ID and client secret.

Service account

1. In IAM & Admin → Service Accounts, create a service account.
2. On its Keys tab, choose Add Key → Create new key → JSON. The file downloads once and cannot be retrieved again.
3. Paste the whole JSON document into the setup form.
4. Share each spreadsheet with the service account's email address, exactly as you would with a colleague. This is the step people miss: without it, the connection authenticates fine and then reports that the spreadsheet does not exist.

Scopes

The connection requests a narrow default set of OAuth scopes. Widening them later requires everyone who authorized the connection to consent again, so it is worth deciding up front whether workflows need to write as well as read.