🤯 The fact that this was done in Sheets, without Apps Script, blew my mind. Studying the formulas taught me things I never knew, like recursive formulas and using checkboxes to force recalculations. https://t.co/kPIWsQgUEn
Wordle clones are causing a bit of a ruckus lately, so I tried my hand at making one in #GoogleSheets!
Well if you count Google Sheet formulas as code, not quite ‘no code’ but never the less very impressive. You can find more work from the creator Tyler Robertson in this portfolio of work which are all “created entirely within Sheets’s built-in features (meaning there’s no Apps Script or Extensions)”
The team at MacMillan Search has generated a lot of value by combining automated STAT reports with Google Sheets through the script they share in this post. From adding ranking details to other tool’s outputs to giving the content teams up-to-date “People Also Ask” reports, the end result has proven to be a great time-saver in our week-to-week SEO workflows by reducing manual work and providing standard outputs that easily integrate with any spreadsheet.
I always enjoy dipping into content from the SEO community as it has some really creative and innovative solutions. This example from MacMillian Search is a use case I’m familiar with, getting data out of a system as an email report with .CSV attachment and using Google Apps Script to do all the automation to update a Google Sheet. If you are not in SEO still worth a read as the pattern used here may come in handy.
“Road to GDE” is a 3-month mentoring program focused on supporting people from historically underrepresented groups in tech on their path to becoming a Google Developer Expert.
This site is hopefully proof that there is an incredibly rich Google Apps Script / Google Workspace developer community. If you are one of those contributors based in EMEA, LATAM and India from an underrepresented group ‘Road to GDE’ is a great opportunity to help you become recognised as a Google Developer Expert in the field that you are already passionate about. The source link contains more information about requirements and how to start your ‘Road to GDE’
ThinkAmI uses the XMLService of Google Apps Script to create a valid RSS feed that is served to the browser using ContentService with the MIME type set as RSS.
Recently I was looking for a Google Apps Script snippet to create a RSS data feed. Back in the day Apps Script used to have a Xml.parseJS() method which could make a data feed from a JavaScript array. It was announced that the old XML service would be replaced by XmlService in 2013 so we are not talking breaking news here.
The RSS helper script created by ThinkAml and shared by Amit Agarwal makes it a lot easier to generate a feed in a couple of lines of code. To let you see I’ve included a snippet and click through to the source post for the full code:
var rss = makeRss();
rss.setTitle('RSS 2.0 Feed with Google Apps Script');
rss.setLink('http://example.com');
rss.setDescription('RSS 2.0 Feed');
rss.setLanguage('en');
rss.setAtomlink('http://example.com/rss');
for (var i = 1; i < 3; i++) {
rss.addItem({
title: 'TITLE:' + i,
link: 'http://example.com/#' + i,
description: 'DESCRIPTION: ' + i,
pubDate: new Date()
})
}
Take control of your inbox by unsubscribing from emails you never have time to read, or have lost interest in. … I opted to use Google Sheets as a centralized place to store emails and their unsubscribe links to make it as user-friendly as possible. This also provided the added benefit of working with Google Apps Script to extract email metadata from Gmail to Google Sheets.
Interesting little Apps Script project for those interested in tidying up your inbox and also an opportunity to try a bit of python. Alternatively you might want to have a go at modifying this solution to also extract unsubscribe links with Google Apps Script
Stack Overflow is a question and answer website for professional and enthusiast programmers. It is the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network, created in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. It features questions and answers on a wide range of topics in computer programming.
Kanshi Tanaike has recently published the 4th annual Stack Overflow trend report for the Google Apps Script question tag. The full report, including how the data is collected, is published here and there is some further discussion on the Google Apps Script Google Group community.
From the headline data it is interesting to see the total number of Google Apps Script questions posted on Stack Overflow has declined following previous years of continued growth. It’s important to remember that this decline is unlikely to directly correlated with general App Script usage. Factors that might be influencing the number of questions asked include like better developer documentation, larger corpus of existing Stack Overflow answers, growing number of other community resources and spaces.
Fig. 1. Year vs. Total questions, answered, solved and closed questions. These all questions include the tag of “google-apps-script” in the tags. Image credit: Kanshi Tanaike
Another consideration is Google Apps Script is increasingly positioned as a platform for citizen developers and low coders. This community may be more hesitant to ask questions on a site that has a reputation as being for ‘professional programmers’. My conclusion is the annual Stack Overflow report for Google Apps Script is always very useful to see, particularly in terms of see if there are enough people answering questions.
Finally, as a little easter egg here is a Google Sheet I’ve created which includes a little Apps Script to fetch my own Stack Overflow annual report data. Copy and open the script editor to add a monthly trigger to get the data. Next year I’m planning to look at changes in post viewcount :)
It’s very convenient to use ScriptApp.getOAuthToken() in an addon to reuse the token from the server side in your client side add-on code. However, these have a limited time to live (1 hour), so what to do if your add on sits around for longer than that? One solution would be to always go for another token every time you needed one, but that would be wasteful. Luckily, there’s a way to check a token to see how much life it has, and only get a new one if it’s almost expired.
There is also a related discussion thread on this post with the author, Bruce Mcpherson, in the Google Apps Script Google Group.
A limitation of the Drive API is that you can only share files with one user at a time. Google Apps Script is synchronous – it doesn’t support the async/await pattern of JavaScript Promises and you therefore cannot run the code in parallel.
There’s however a simple workaround to help you share a file or folder in Google Drive with multiple users in one go in parallel using the UrlFetchApp service.
On Pulse Phil recently shared a snippet for changing a Google Drive file permissions from Editor to Viewer. In this example for Amit Agarwal you can see how you can make these types of changes for multiple users without slowing down your script execution time.
As this amazing year comes to an end, I decided to note down all my blogs, videos in the past year. This has been an amazing year for me academically and professionally. I have passed all my engineering exams and am in my 3rd year of engineering. I am also constantly helping my college automate internal processes using Google Apps Script and Google Workspace. You can check them out in the blog link given below
Looking at his summary post from Aryan Irani we’ve clearly not been able to keep up here on Pulse with the volume of content that they have published. The summary post linked here is an opportunity to review some of Aryan’s top community contributions from this year.
The Google Forms API is currently in Open Beta. For Google Apps Script users the new Forms API is worth keeping an eye on as it enables functionality not currently included in the native FormsApp service. In this post from Kanshi Tanaike an example is looked at where the Forms API is used to insert an image to a question. If you are interested in trying this example out remember that you currently need to apply for access at the Early Adopter Program page.
