I've almost automated creating a new Obsidian entry, with one last problem

For the last year my new client onboarding has had two manual steps required. One is entering a second email into their Xero contact (I’m a marriage celebrant, my clients are two people) but the main one was creating a new Obsidian note for each couple.

For the last year I’ve had my Zapier Zap that runs when someone books me in as their celebrant. The Zap is fired when the couple filled out a Typeform form, and the Obsidian entry was a text email to me that I would copy/paste into Obsidian.

I was thinking about it today, and realised that if I moved my Obsidian vault to my Dropbox folder, I could create a new file with Zapier and remove one of my last two manual steps.

But there’s one big stupid problem: Zapier/Dropbox only allow .txt files to be created by a Zap, and the rename zap function doesn’t allow changing of file extension.

I’m so close, I’ve got the file in the right folder and even Obsidian can look at it if you allow for “Detect all file extensions” but it’s still not an .md so Obsidian doesn’t treat it the same.

Any ideas for an automated, cloud-based, solution to make that .txt an .md?

It isn’t cloud based, but I’m pretty sure Hazel could do that.

Hazel could rename it by watching the local Dropbox folder synced to the computer Hazel runs on

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I hear you on Hazel. I was really hoping for a Zapier or similar solution, because my Mac is a MacBook and I’m not always on it, often working from iPhone or iPad.

This plugin claims to allow viewing and editing .txt files in Obsidian just like .md files, thereby removing the need to change the extension. Try and see if that solves your issue.

It may have improved, but last I tried this, it let me see and manipulate .txt files in Obsidian as if they were .Md files – but search didn’t turn them up for whatever reason