Understanding Sync

eg2 never reads directly from your spreadsheet when a customer loads the portal. Instead, it maintains its own copy of your data, which is updated on each sync. Customers always read from this copy — it keeps the portal fast and protects your spreadsheet from load.

Automatic Sync

For Google Sheets, eg2 registers a real-time change notification with Google Drive. Whenever anyone with edit access saves a change to the spreadsheet, Google notifies eg2 within seconds and a new sync begins automatically.

Excel and CSV files sync in the same way — eg2 detects changes and updates automatically.

You don’t need to do anything — just edit your file and the portal updates on its own, typically within a minute.

Manual Sync

You can trigger a sync at any time from the admin panel:

1. Open the portal in the admin panel.
2. Click Sync Now in the portal’s sync panel.
3. The status changes to Processing. When it returns to Synced, the data is up to date.

Manual sync is also useful after making large bulk edits and wanting to confirm they’re live immediately.

Sync States

The admin panel shows the current sync state for each portal:

When Sync Fails

Failed usually means eg2 could not read the file. Common causes:

• eg2’s special email address was removed from the file’s sharing settings.
• The file was moved or deleted in Google Drive.
• The File ID in the portal settings no longer points to an accessible file.

To resolve:

1. Check that the file is still shared with eg2’s special email address (visible in the portal settings page).
2. Click Sync Now to retry.

Oversized Error means the file has more rows or data than eg2 can process in a single sync. To resolve, reduce the data — archive old rows to a separate sheet, or split into multiple portals.

Sync and Images

If your portal has image columns, images are downloaded from Google Drive during each sync.

Checking the Last Sync Time

The admin panel shows the timestamp of the last successful sync for each portal. If the time looks stale and you’ve made recent changes, click Sync Now and watch the state move through Pending → Processing → Synced.