I use Google Apps Script to support staff and students in my job. I enjoy dabbling with creating tools to help with automation and I freely share my learning experiences on my blog, where I also have a number of useful Google Add-ons: www.pbainbridge.co.uk
The following Google Apps Script code was developed as a tool to check that all the necessary data existed in a spreadsheet before another function was triggered. The reason for this was that if any data was missing it would affect the student Group files I was creating (eg no email address or name) that would eventually prevent further functions from running at a later date.
This tool is designed to bulk save emails (and associated attachments) from a specified Gmail label into a Google Drive folder, with relevant threads combined into a single PDF document.
A standalone function that you could include in your scripting projects to help determine which user ran a script and what actions it has performed. It is designed to output the information into a Google sheet – Date/Time, User, Action.
Create a PDF version of a Google Doc, move it into a new folder, remove its parents so it only exists in the new folder (typically also exists in My Drive) and then trash the Doc.
Recently during a consultation I was asked if it would be possible to check if the date submitted on a Google form was over a month ago, to which I responded “sure …”.
Admittedly this was a lot more difficulty than I thought it would (and should) be – I was bamboozled by online forums and posts suggesting to convert dates into numbers and perform other incoherent functions to achieve this. Eventually however I came across the single JavaScript function that I would need to achieve this feat …… ‘getMonth’.
The following Google Apps Script code is from some recent learning I have been doing when asked about locking-down certain areas of a sheet. I knew of named ranges and protecting cells but not quite that it could be done with apps script.
Take a date and extract the day of the week from it. By making use of ‘formatDate’ and the pattern ‘EEEE’ within a few lines of code we have a workable week-day name that could be used in an if statement as discussed in the previous post.
This was developed as I wanted to learn about removing Google Form option choices as part of exploring its capabilities for use with appointment slots. I am aware there are a number of Google add-ons that achieve this but they come with potential data protection issues when accessing your Google Account, hence an in-house approach.
The principle is simply that a user would select their desired appointment slot on the Form and then that option would be unavailable for the next user accessing the Form.
Screenshot of template sheet with signatures to copy to other files
Take a template Google Sheet (containing fields for 3 signatures) and copy it into other Google Sheet files within a given Google Drive folder and then reorder those sheets so that it was the first one.
The idea was based around needing users to authorise student marks with their signature from multiple Google Sheet reports produced from a third party system.
