Gmail School Circular Summarizer with Gemini + Sheets

Turn school circular PDFs into parent-ready summaries—automatically

The Gmail School Circular Summarizer with Gemini + Sheets monitors a labeled Gmail inbox for school circulars, extracts text from attached PDFs, uses Google Gemini to produce a structured, parent-friendly digest, prevents duplicates with Google Sheets, and emails the final summary to a parent address.

What this workflow does

• Checks Gmail every hour for new emails inside your specified label (using a Gmail trigger).
• Normalizes email metadata and detects whether the message includes an attachment.
• Downloads the attachment from Gmail and extracts text from the attached PDF.
• If PDF text extraction is incomplete, creates fallback text so the workflow can continue reliably.
• Generates a stable fingerprint for each circular and looks it up in Google Sheets to avoid sending the same circular multiple times.
• For new circulars, sends the finalized text to Google Gemini to extract structured fields (e.g., dates, fees, actions) and produce both a short and detailed digest.
• Appends the structured record to Google Sheets, then emails the formatted summary via Gmail to the parent recipient.

Use cases

• School admins who want to convert circular PDFs into consistent updates for parents without manual copy/paste.
• Automation engineers building an n8n workflow for document-to-digest pipelines (Gmail → PDF text → Gemini → email).
• SaaS operators needing de-duplication and audit logging for recurring inbound communications.

Technical details

• Gmail Trigger (checks a specific label hourly) + Gmail sending step.
• Google Sheets integration for circular logging and duplicate checks.
• Node usage including: if, code, gmail, and sticky note.
• Google Gemini (PaLM/Gemini) for structured extraction and digest generation.

Setup: connect Gmail, set the trigger label, connect Gemini credentials and choose the model, and provide your Google Sheets spreadsheet ID, sheet name, and columns for the circular log/duplicate fingerprint.