Marketing a Google Workspace Add-On is a comprehensive guide advises developers on best practices for marketing a Google Workspace add-on.
This post comes thanks to John McGowan, Automagical Apps, who has worked with ALK Digital Marketing to develop a marketing strategy for Google Workspace Add-ons. The guide has lots of useful tips for understanding the Google Workspace Marketplace and developing optimised marketing resources for the Workspace Marketplace as well as other channels including your website, social media and email marketing campaigns.
There is also some guidance on how to approach monetization of your add-on which includes balancing free rials, paid subscriptions and adaptive pricing. This will likely change dependent on the type of add-on you are creating and the value it brings to users. Follow the source link to read more..
This post describes how I designed and ran an audience survey with over 1,700 responses, using Google Forms, Sheets, Apps Script, and ChatGPT. I’ll show you the entire process from end-to-end, including how I:
Created a survey with Google Forms
Used Apps Script to automatically say thank you to 1,700 respondents
Analyzed the response data in Google Sheets
Used AI to help me understand the qualitative data
Presented the results in Google Docs
It’s rather fitting that the 1,000th Pulse post features content by the one and only Ben Collins! Back in late 2019, when I was thinking about creating a new community site for Google Workspace developers, Ben’s encouragement was the spark that ignited AppsScriptPulse.
And today’s post by Ben is a nice example of Apps Script’s power to automate repetitive tasks. As part of this he shows how to craft personalised “thank you” emails for Google Form survey response with Google Apps Script. Ben’s insights go beyond ‘thank-you’s as he outlines how he administers and analyses customer surveys, highlighting his design choices for Google Forms and data analysis using built-in Google Sheets functions.
To take things a step further, Ben also highlights how he used ChatGPT to categorize qualitative survey responses. With Google’s recent announcement of their new AI model, Gemini, which outperforms ChatGPT in a number of academic benchmarks, it would be interesting to see how these two platforms compare for this type of analysis.
Raising a glass (or an espresso :) to Ben and this 1,000-post milestone!
Creating dynamic charts in the sidebar of your Google Workspace Add-on can be an effective approach to getting across a lot of meaning in a somewhat confined space. In this tutorial, we will use Google’s Chart API to generate a live chart, first from some static data and then live from an external data source like a Google Sheet. All with the help of a little Google Apps Script magic.
Here’s another great tutorial from Scott Donald which provides a detailed tutorial for including charts in a Google Workspace Add-on using the Card Service. The tutorial covers how you can embed dynamic chart data from a Google Sheet. Whilst targeted at Google Workspace Add-ons (Gmail and Drive) you should be able to easily modify this for cards used in Google Chat. The source tutorial includes a video giving an overview of the solution and if you want to take this project further you can signup for Scott’s Create and Publish Google Workspace Add-ons with Google Apps Script: Master Class.
The v3 of the Google Drive API has actually been around for a number of years launched on December 14, 2015. One of the reasons Google introduced version 3 was it came with performance improvements.
My impression is that the gap between the v2 and v3 has narrowed over the years with minor release updates, but there are still some areas where you can get more from the v3 API. One example reported by Kanshi Tanaike is to query Google Drive files by createdTime.
Google provide a Drive API v2 & v3 comparison guide, which highlights the main differences between the two versions of the API. To use v3 in your Apps Script project when you enable the Advanced Service for Drive you can select the version number.
You’ve made a formula, but someone deleted it. It may be annoying to restore your formula. You are not always able to protect a range with formulas, as protection will also forbid users from sorting range, adding new rows, hiding rows, etc.
Let’s create our formula protection with the help of a few formulas and app script code.
Google Sheets are fantastic for collaboration, the downside however can be that other people can break stuff. The Protected Sheets and Ranges can help with this, but there might be times when you need an alternative solution. If you find yourself in this situation Max Makhrov has come to the rescue with a solution to rewrite formula if they are accidentally deleted. You can find out more in the source post link. As a bonus Max includes a named Google Sheets function, FormulasMap, which can be used to export functions in a range to another sheet.
Hopefully you are already subscribed to the official Google Workspace Developer Newsletter. If not, or in case you missed the last edition the headline story highlights some new documentation to help developers understand and compare different options for extending the Google Workspace UI:
A major challenge for developers is understanding their options for extending the UI of Google Workspace: Google Workspace Add-ons, Editor Add-ons, Chat apps, Drive apps, and more! Each option has unique strengths, challenges, and limitations. Until now, there hasn’t been a central place for developers to learn what’s possible for extending the Google Workspace UI and to compare the limitations that exist in terms of coding options, UI frameworks, and which options can be published to the Google Workspace Marketplace.
The page includes a nice table included in this post as the feature image.
Imagen: An photo image which has a laptop with a spreadsheet application which appears to have rays of light
This is the second part exploring the GenAI capabilities in Google Sheets. In this part learn how you can make an Enhanced Smart Fill for Google Sheets
Google recently announced the latest feature for Duet AI for Google Workspace with Enhanced Smart Fill, which uses GenAI in Google Sheets to generate content based on data and the patterns entered by the user.
Continuing a previous post exploring the PaLM 2 API and LLM capabilities in Google Sheets, this post looks provides a Google Sheet template for experimenting with LLM prompts and spreadsheet data, including how you could make a ‘Enhanced Smart Fill’-like star review generator.
The post includes everything you need to get started, with you only having to make your own MakerSuite API key.
From one simple prompt with Duet AI for AppSheet you are able to create a well structured application.
I recently had the pleasure of the opportunity to speak at DevFest Scotland. My topic was how you can use code with Google’s ‘no-code’ solution AppSheet. You can see some of the ways this is achievable in my shared slides. Whilst there are coding opportunities with AppSheet and having some coding/data schema knowledge is useful, I would argue that this is increasingly becoming less important.
In this post on the CTS Medium I share how Duet AI for AppSheet has hugely reduced the entry point for app creation. As part of this I share how a simple request to the Duet AI for AppSheet assistant of ‘an easy way for volunteers to borrow a laptop’ becomes the starting point for a well structured application. Having introduced AppSheet to a number of customers I can’t emphasise enough how big a step this is in the democratisation of app creation. Exciting times!
[Thanks to Christian Schalk and the AppSheet team for early access to Duet AI for AppSheet and providing input on the source post].
An intense 48-hour tour of AppSheet, Google’s flagship nocode tool, from the perspective of a newcomer to the platform (part 4/4).
The forth and final part in Pablo Felip’s AppSheet in 48 hours series 😟. I’m sure there will be more from Pablo on AppSheet, but the rumour is he’ll be next publishing some Apps Script posts.
For the final part Pablo discusses the different types of actions available in AppSheet, including system actions and user-defined actions, and how to use them to create custom functionality in apps. There is a lot you can do with actions from writing data, navigation and more.
Something else touched upon in Pablo’s post is the intelligent assistant available throughout AppSheet. Using the assistant to help you create actions can also save you a lot of time, particular with toggling actions for yes/no checkboxes. If you can find the good way to describe what you want the assistant can handle creating the action, related icons and behaviour to toggle the appearance of one of the actions.
In Google Apps Script, the ability to track and record actions, errors, and performance metrics is crucial for both developers and users. However, the built-in logging mechanisms often fall short regarding accessibility and ease of use. This is where Local Google Apps Script Logging comes into play, offering a streamlined and integrated approach to capturing script activities.
Google Apps Script has a couple of logging options, including the native Apps Script execution log, to setting up a Cloud Developer Console project and using Cloud Logging and Error Reporting. There are a couple of alternative Apps Script logging solutions out there, like Peter Herrmann’s BetterLog. Here’s the latest alternative Apps Script logging solution from Dimitris Paxinos called LocalLogger.
LocalLogger has some nice features including built-in severity colour coding and customisable email notifications. Even if you don’t need a alternative logging solution the code is well structured and includes a way to mimic an Enum list. You can find all the code and a video explaining LocalLogger via the source link 👇🏻
