Telegram Journal Replies to Google Sheets

Save a user’s reply to a bot’s dated journal prompt as a row in Google Sheets.

Setup

Connect your Telegram bot in Receive a Telegram message, deploy a public HTTPS callback and activate the workflow. Set the bot and user usernames without @ in Check the dated journal reply. Both accounts must have usernames, and the bot must receive the user’s reply in the chosen chat.

Connect Google Sheets in Append the journal entry, set the spreadsheet ID and A1 range, and place entry and date headers in that order. In n8n, select Telegram and Google Sheets OAuth2 credentials, set the same usernames in Check the dated journal reply, and configure the sheet and range in Add entry to sheet. Activate only one format for the bot webhook.

Behavior

Reply to a message from the configured bot with a text entry. The bot’s prompt must contain a colon followed by the date, for example What did you do: 2026-11-10. The workflow takes the text after the first colon up to any next colon, removes whitespace and saves that value as date; the reply text becomes entry. It does not validate the date or send a reminder. This can be paired with Telegram Journal Reminder.

Other users, non-replies and non-text messages are ignored. A matching reply with a malformed bot prompt fails before writing. Usernames are Telegram profile fields and can change; restrict the bot and sheet to people who should access journal entries. Google Sheets receives values as RAW text. A failed or uncertain append may already have written a row; inspect the sheet before replaying. Open Flow uses Telegram update IDs to help deduplicate webhook admission; the native n8n trigger does not add that same key. Neither format guarantees exactly-once sheet writes or automatic failed-run replay.

Changes to the source

• Make bot/user setup explicit and ignore unrelated updates before reading reply fields.
• Preserve the original colon-based date extraction and entry text, and append only matching replies.
• Use a secret-checked Telegram trigger version and replace private spreadsheet/credential identifiers.

Adapted from Save Telegram reply to journal spreadsheet in Zie619/n8n-workflows. The source export does not identify a separate template author or license.

The collection’s MIT notice is pinned at a later revision. This is the collection notice at that revision; it does not establish a separate original template author’s license. Our changes are listed above; see repository licensing.

MIT License

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