In this post I want to cover three things. First I want to introduce a little app I’ve developed which allows you to create a RSS feed for any of your Gmail labels (with the option to remove certain links – useful if you don’t want others unsubscribing you from mailing lists). Secondly I explain how it was made and how you can use it yourself. Finally I want to discuss how this could be used in an open course environment, utilising the vast processing power from services like Twitter and reusing their target marketing emails to your benefit with a bit of ‘dark social judo’.
This solution was first published in May 2013 and since then Google Apps Script has evolved deprecating services that originally made this solution possible, in particular, ScriptDB and the original XML service which includes a handy .parseJS() method.
Following a request I’ve recently updated the solution to make it work again. As well as swapping out ScriptDB in favor of using the Properties Service I used the makeRSS method previously highlighted here in Apps Script Pulse.
Learn how to easy import transactions from PayPal into Google Sheets with Google Apps Script. You can import standard transactions, recurring subscriptions and donations.
Even if you aren’t interested in PayPal this post is well worth looking at as the author, Amit Agarwal, is a master when it comes to handling data with Google Apps Script and there is a general patterns of ‘get data from an API, write it to a Google Sheet’ that might be useful for your own projects.
No Google Apps Script SDK for your favorite API? No problem!
I’ve never seen a Google Apps Script SDK made available as part of an API, as, surprise surprise, it’s not the most popular choice for professional development. It’s time to start changing that, so we will learn to build our own!
[Editor note: Really impressive work from Dmitry providing a framework you can use to develop your own service for interacting with 3rd party APIs. The post includes lots of clear instructions and guidance to help you understand and learn about approaches for structuring your Google Apps Script code projects]
A simple and small Google Apps Script library for quickly and easily finding and updating records in Google Sheets with a familiar ORM-like syntax
Following our previous post on Converting Google Sheets cell values to an object array, Vance Lucas (@vlucas) got in touch to highlight the SheetQuery library he has created which as well as being able to get Google Sheet data as an object array has some additional nice features for updating cell values. As Vance highlights:
sometimes working with spreadsheets to find and update specific rows of data can be awkward and tedious. There is no direct built-in way to search for specific values in rows by headings. To do this with the Google-supplied APIs, you have to keep track of row index numbers, column index numbers, and arrays of row data while planning your updates. It’s not fun code to write, and it’s relatively error-prone, especially if you are deleting rows, which causes the row index numbers to shift dynamically.
The library includes a .where method which can be used to apply a filtering function to select the rows of a spreadsheet to be read and/or updated. If you are regularly developing scripts that interact with Google Sheets data this can be a great library to keep in mind.
This is a sample script for converting the values of Google Spreadsheet to an object using Google Apps Script.
I have a minor obsession with methods for converting Google Sheets data to an object array. Over the years I’ve documented various approaches I’ve developed on my personal site, like this one, but this solution from Kanshi Tanaike has to be my new favourite:
I’ve long been interested in using one of the big office productivity platforms to build an embedded add-on. For a solo developer it’s a no-brainer: the platform takes care of the requirements above, and when the platform has a marketplace, there’s even a ready to go distribution channel to take it to market! The only real reason I’ve resisted it so far is fear of the slog of platform approval processes and required collateral. In this story I’ll explain how I felt the fear and did it anyway 😀
Google OAuth verification and Workspace Add-on app review can be quite daunting the first time you go through the process. In this post from Gareth Cronin he shares his own personal journey getting his JIT Time Google Calendar Add-on verified and approved. There are some great tips and resources shared in the post including how to show the OAuth client ID in the add-on demo video submitted as part of the verification processes.
Amit Agarwal has recently been busy continuing to publish lots of incredibly useful Google Apps Script tips and snippets on his ‘Digital Inspiration’ blog. Three recent posts might be of particular interest to Google Workspace administrators:
[This Google Apps] Scripts gets the name and email address of users in the organization and saves the list inside a Google Spreadsheet. This script can only be executed by the domain administrator.
Learn how the Google Workspace admin can change the Google account passwords of multiple users in their organization automatically with Google Apps Script.
This article covers how to pull scripts from multiple projects and import them into another project. You can even use this to make container bound script standalone, or visa versa. … This article will cover the library that does all that, along with various other usage examples – for example, pulling in code snippets from or libraries, merging manifests, or testing add-ons.
Some more magic from Bruce Mcpherson this time creating and documenting a library that can be used to copy/replace scripts. Bruce’s illustrates this with an example of pushing a standalone script to a container bound Google Sheet project and I’m sure you can find many other ways this could be useful to maintain script projects.
Generate dynamic Open Graph images for your website with Google Sheets without requiring Puppeteer. All pages on your website can have their own unique Open Graph images created from a Google Slides template.
As explained by Amit Agarwal Open Graph images are included as a feature image on social media sites when the link is shared. You can use static images but some sites like Github dynamically create an image that includes additional information.
For example, if you were to share the link to the Google Workspace Solutions Github repo on Twitter an image is automictically displayed containing information like the number of contributors, issues, stars and forks:
To generate these images often a headless browser solution like Puppeteer is used. In this example from Amit he shows how a Google Slides template and a little Google Apps Script can be used to batch create similar open graph images.
Google Apps Scripts is incredibly powerful and enables complex systems to be built on top of Google Apps. It can be a great choice when you need to quickly prototype an idea or design a solution that’s customizable by non-technical users.
In this article, I will walk through a simple example of building a “Slot Booking System” using Google Sheets, Google Calendar, HTML, Tailwind CSS and Google Apps Script.
Nice little Apps Script project shared in this post using Google Calendar and a published web app, making it possibly a nice starter project for something bigger.
