AppsScriptPulse

12 Years and 1000 pages in Office, Google (Docs,Gsuite) Workspace, and other stuff – Desktop Liberation

I’ve been running this site for about 12 years ago. with over 1000 pages of content, here’s some of the high (and low) lights. I came to Apps Script not long after it was available, my first foray into it was probably around 2010, and I started writing about it not long afterwards.

I’m sure many Google Workspace developers are familiar with the work of Bruce Mcpherson. Regardless of whether or not you have, this is a nice summary of the last 12+ years of work published by Bruce last year but well worth revisiting. It covers everything from his move from VBA to focus on Apps Script, useful script libraries and code as well as explorations into other Google Cloud products.

Source: 12 Years and 1000 pages in Office,Google (Docs,Gsuite) Workspace, and other stuff – Desktop Liberation

Live and pre-recorded tech talks for Google Workspace Admins

Google Workspace Admins is an IT admin driven series of live and pre-recorded technical talks covering any and all topics that a Google Workspace Admin would find useful. We’ll cover topics that would benefit the Tier 1 IT help desk admin on up to the super admin and the CIO. Signup to get invited to all future events.

I’ve been a Google Workspace Admin for over a decade, mostly working on small domains. More recently my role requires me to support larger domains, often with enhanced security needs and the requirement to generally do everything on a bigger scale. This is where tools like GAM and Google Apps Script become essential to help with the heavy lifting.

Broadening the range of Google Workspace domains I support has also required me to broaden the channels and communities where I can learn and keep up-to-date. Recently, I was pointed to the Google Workspace Admins YouTube channel. Whilst this channel is relatively new it’s bursting with a wide range of technical focused solutions and discussions. Follow the link to subscribe to the channel and there is a form to get invited to all future events.

Source: Google Workspace Admins

Happy Birthday Google Apps Script – In celebration a searchable community database of Apps Script libraries..

Since Google Apps Script was released on August 19th, 2009, it is used by a lot of users. By this, now there are a lot of useful libraries of Google Apps Script (GAS) in all over the world. But when I want to search a GAS library, I always use Google search engine. Unfortunately, in the current stage, the libraries cannot be directly searched by a database. On January 11th, 2020, a proposal for the database of Google Apps Script Library has been proposed by Andrew Roberts. When I have discussing about this with him, I thought that I tried to think of a sample database. So I prepared this…

Google Apps Script turns 13 years old today and in celebration we are highlighting this combined community contribution. As you will see from the source repo commit history this searchable database of Google Apps Script libraries has been around for a while, but given what it represents we thought worth celebrating.

Source: GitHub – tanaikech/Google-Apps-Script-Library-Database: This is for the Google Apps Script Library Database and a web application for searching the libraries..

Use your Google Apps Script skills in the Coda Packathon and compete for $20K in prizes

Build an extension that adds new powers to Coda docs for a chance at $20,000 in prizes.

In my opinion Apps Script is a somewhat undervalued skill. So much of the world runs on spreadsheets, and many of those sheets are glued together using Apps Script. Well the good news is that your Apps Script skills are the perfect fit for a virtual hackathon running now: the Coda Packathon.

Coda is a new kind of doc, built for teams, sort of like a cross between Sheets, Docs, and Sites. Instead of a scripting language Coda includes Packs, a simple plugin mechanism that lets you enhance the core features of the doc. We just launched the platform, and to celebrate we’re running a six-week virtual hackathon to see who can build the best Packs.

Writing a Pack is a lot like writing an Apps Script:

  1. You can create a Pack from start to finish in your browser (use pack.new)
  2. Packs are written using JavaScript (technically TypeScript, but you don’t need to use types)
  3. Packs can be used to add a custom formula, sync data into a table, update a record in an API.

You can learn more about the Packathon and register here: coda.devpost.com.

Source: Coda Packathon

Google Workspace Add-On Walkthroughs (GWAOw!) 2 – ImportFromWeb by NoDataNoBusiness – Yagisanatode

In this episode of Google Workspace Add On Walkthroughs (GWAOw!), we take a look at ImportFromWeb by NoDataNoBusiness.

ImportFromWeb is a powerful web scraping tool for Google Sheets that allows you to grab data from any website. The creators call it IMPORTXML on steroids.

The latest episode from Scott Donald’s GWAOw! is now available. As explained by Scott ImportFromWeb is a Google Sheets add-on which allows users to use the custom function to import data from other websites into Google Sheets.

Even though this add-on is primarily used to add a custom function to Google Sheets the developers, NoDataNoBusiness, have taken the time to use the sidebar with some useful UI elements to help users get started.

Source: GWAOw! 2 – ImportFromWeb by NoDataNoBusiness – Yagisanatode

NEW COURSE: Mastering the QUERY Function in Google Sheets

Image credit: Ben Collins (benlcollins.com)

Master the QUERY function, the most powerful function in Google Sheets, to become a more effective data analyst

Friend of Pulse and Google Sheets guru, Ben Collins, has a new course ‘The QUERY Function in Google Sheets’. The QUERY function it lets you perform various data manipulations making it easy to reshape, aggregate and explore your data in Google Sheets. The course is designed to be suitable for everyone from beginner to advanced who are interested in ways to work more effectively with your data.

If you are not familiar with the QUERY function Ben provides one example of what is possible in Sheets Tip 204: How To Use Dates In The QUERY Function (check the linked post in this Sheet Tip for an example worksheet).

Bonus: Sheets Tip 204 includes a 50% discount on the course valid until Friday 20 May 2022 at midnight EDT.

Finally, if you are interested in using the QUERY language in Google Apps Script it is possible! Below is some code used in this copy of Ben’s example workbook based on:

// based on https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/053d3ebbe76fa7c0b5e80ea9d6396011#sample-script

function myFunction() {
  const doc = SpreadsheetApp.getActive()
  const spreadsheetId = doc.getId(); // or set another Spreadsheet ID.
  const sheetId = doc.getSheetByName('Data').getSheetId(); // or set another Sheet ID from Spreadsheet ID.

  const query = "select C, B where B > date '2000-01-01' and B <= date '2002-12-31'"; // your QUERY

  const url = `https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/${spreadsheetId}/gviz/tq?tqx=out:csv&gid=${sheetId}&tq=${encodeURI(query)}&access_token=${ScriptApp.getOAuthToken()}`;

  const res = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url,);
  console.log(res.getContentText());

  const array = Utilities.parseCsv(res.getContentText());
  console.log(array);

  // SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet(); // This comment line is put for automatically detecting the scopes if directly adding a spreadsheet ID.
}

Source: The QUERY Function in Google Sheets

New YouTube series ‘GWAOw! Google Workspace Add-on Walkthroughs’ from yagisanatode.com

GWAOw! is a YouTube series that explores the best Google Workspace Add Ons in the Google Marketplace to help you learn what is out there.

This new YouTube series from Scott Donald at yagisanatode.com will hopefully be a great way to see and learn how other developers have implemented Google Workspace Add-ons, picking up UI tips and tricks. For the first episode Scott takes a look at Workbook Statistics by Sourabh Choraria. Scott is planning one/two episodes a month and if you have published your own add-ons you can find out about getting it featured in GWAOw!.

Source: GWAOw! Google Workspace Add-on Walkthroughs – Yagisanatode

💩 ShiitCoin: Putting a blockchain on Google Sheets with Google Apps Script

Some ideas are bad, and then sometimes there are ideas so bad they actually go back around to being genius — we think we’ve come across one of those. Yes! We have an end to end blockchain working entirely off of a google sheet: transaction broadcasting, mining, wallets, gossip — all of it! ShiitCoin is (obviously) a troll project not meant to be rEaL mOnEy 💴 but we’re hoping to farm some internet points there’s some educational value to exploring the barebones of a blockchain which we’ll share here.

In pre-pandemic times I used to give a talk entitled ‘..you can do that with Apps Script’, which includes some more of the extreme examples of projects people tackle with Google Apps Script. This project by nalinbhardwaj (Nalin Bhardwaj) and Adhyyan1252 (Adhyyan Sekhsaria) definitely falls into the fun/interesting category and who knows you may find some interesting code snippets in the associated Github repo that might be useful … but no guarantees.   

Via Andrew Roberts

Source: ShiitCoin: Putting a blockchain on Google Sheets

Google Apps Script community contributions —Summary of 2021 — Aryan Irani

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.

Source: Summary of 2021 — Aryan Irani

Getting started with Google Apps Script – Aryan Irani

Image credit: Aryan Irani

In this course, we will be covering the basics of Google Apps Script and working our way by working with Google Sheets, Google Workspace API’s and more. After working with variables, operators, loops in Google Apps Script, we will be working with Google Sheets, where we will start out by getting and setting values in Google Sheets, followed by doing some amazing projects in Google Sheets and Google Apps Script. After working with Google Sheets, we will work with Google Forms, Google Classroom, YouTube and more.

It’s always pleasing to see new Google Apps Script courses being published. The latest one we’ve spotted has been created by Aryan Irani and hosted on Udemy. We’ve not taken this course but the landing page contains an overview and previews of some of the video content.

Source: Getting started with Google Apps Script – Aryan Irani