A useful library to create prettified HTML, XML GraphML and other markups directly from Apps Script or JavaScript.
A long, long, long time ago Apps Script had a Xml class which was deprecated in favour of the current XML Service. One of the nice features of the old Xml class was the Xml.parseJS() method, which “given a JavaScript array … returns an XmlDocument representation”.
The current XML Service doesn’t have a JavaScript to XML parser, but Bruce Mcpherson has recently shared a library that can be used to easily convert JSON objects into XML and it’s many recognised formats like HTML. Bruce’s post shows how to can create various HTML page elements including head sections and tables. It’s also worth checking out Bruce’s other post on “Create GraphML markups from Apps Script” which is included in the source link.
We recently launched the Google Workspace APIs Explorer, a new tool to help streamline developing on the Google Workspace Platform. What is this handy tool and how can you start using it?
The Google Workspace APIs Explorer is a tool that allows you to explore and test Google Workspace APIs without having to write any code. It’s a great way to get familiar with the capabilities of the many Google Workspace APIs.
The Google Apps Script editor bakes in some nice features including inline documentation to help when you are coding your script project (and if you don’t already know, next time you are in the online script editor press ctrl + space :). To help with discovery Google have recently published the Google Workspace APIs Explorer website, which lets you see and test a range of Google APIs. For Google Apps Script developers this site is a great way to help you understand how you can use the Advanced Services (my tip for Workspace admins is to check out the Directory and Report API which as part of the Admin SDK API Advanced Service).
Have you ever wished for a personal assistant who could give you a quick summary of your day’s events while you’re busy getting ready in the morning? I worked on a Google Apps Script that does just that! By collecting events from in Google Calendar, generating a summary using ChatGPT, and creating a voice file with Google Text to Speech, the script will send a daily summary straight to their Google Chat Spaces.
Not surprising given the current interest in generative AI to see more examples emerging from the Google Workspace developer community. This latest example comes from Stéphane Giron who shares how he is able to recreate some Google Assistant functionality with Google Apps Script and calls to the ChatGPT and Google Cloud Text to Speech services. All the main code snippets from this project are available in the source post link.
Have you heard about ChatGPT? It’s the latest buzz in the world of AI and everyone’s eager to unleash its true powers. As I delved deeper, I wondered — is it possible to integrate ChatGPT with Google Sheets? Can we pass prompts from Google Sheets and get a response from ChatGPT?
After some research, I discovered that it’s indeed possible to integrate ChatGPT with Google Sheets using the Open AI API. In this blog, we’ll be exploring how to bring AI to your spreadsheets using the Open AI API and Google Apps Script.
This blog post discusses how to integrate AI in Google Sheets using Google Apps Script by passing prompts to ChatGPT, a large language model. It provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up the integration and use it to generate responses to prompts.
Aryan Irani is a Google Developer Expert for Google Workspace. He is a writer and content creator who has been working in the Google Workspace domain for three years.
If you are playing around with Sheet colors with Apps Script, you sometimes find yourself with font colors that don’t go well with the background colors you’ve chosen. However, we can use Yiq values to decide whether the luminance of the background color would be best with a light or a dark foreground font color. Here’s a small Apps Script library to figure it out for you.
Nice little helper library from Bruce Mcpherson if you’ve like to automatically apply contrasting colours to Google Sheets ranges. The source post from Bruce provides the background to the YIQ colour system as well as how to use the library. Follow the source link for more details.
In this post, I would like to introduce a sample script for putting Time-based One-time Password (TOTP) value into Google Spreadsheet using Google Apps Script.
For UK readers, no not Top of the Pops (TOTP), but Time-based One Time Passwords (TOTP). In the context of Google Workspace it’s more than likely that you can rely on the built-in Google Identity and account security features rather than rolling your own form of two-factor authentication (2FA). Should you be in such a situation when you need to authenticate outside of Google then this example integration of the OTPAuth library in Google Apps Script might be of interest. Rather than just updating a Google Sheet you could combine with MailApp/GmailApp to email the passcode for the user to use. See the source post for implementation information and caveats.
you can use the following Apps Script to create folders in Google Drive for students and share those folders with their email addresses based on data from a Google Sheet
Whilst this post from Amit Agarwal looks at the automatic creation of Google Drive folders, it’s also worth having a look at it at for an Apps Script pattern for iterating over and processing data from Google Sheets. In particular there is a getStudentData()function that turns the 2D array return from .getValues() into an object array which includes a rowIndex. This makes it easy to update your Google Sheet when each row is processed.
If you monitor important websites and require advanced features, tools such as UptimeRobot is the solution for you. However, if you only have a few personal websites and want a simple, customizable, and free alternative for monitoring them, this may be a better option.
In this tutorial, I will guide you through setting up a website monitor using Google Apps Script and Google Sheets. This monitor will periodically check the status of your websites and notify you via email and Google Chat (optional) if any issues are detected.
We’ve featured other website uptime solutions using Google Apps Script, this one is nice because it also includes an optional Google Chat integration allowing to send alerts your preferred Chat Space. Another useful feature, used by a number of paid for uptime monitors, is defining a keyword which must be found in the page. Follow the link to the source post for all the code and instructions on getting started.
There are two ways to pull email addresses from Gmail messages. The simpler, and more popular, method is that you pull a list of messages from which you wish to extract the email and loop over them to extract the email addresses. A more efficient way to pull email addresses from multiple email messages is to make a single batch request to the Gmail API with the help of Apps Script’s UrlFetch service.
We’ve featured a couple of posts on how you can make batch requests with Google Workspace APIs. With the limited runtime in Apps Script using batches can be an invaluable tool to finish your script in the execution limit and also improve your user experience. In this particular example for Amit Agarwal he looks at how batch requests can be made to the Gmail API by first get message details from a call to Gmail.Users.Messages.list, before getting message details in a single UrlFetchApp.fetchAll call. All the example code is included in the source post and to get to execute it copy/paste/run the following function:
Image credit: Full diagram of invoice automation in Gmail with Document AI and Apps Script – Stéphane Giron
Tired of manually managing your invoices in Gmail? Say goodbye to the hassle and hello to efficiency with Document AI and Apps Script.
There is a lot of buzz around generative AI, but it’s also worth remembering Google have a well established service offer in other forms of AI, the Document AI being one example of this. This post from Stéphane Giron highlight an Apps Script based workflow for analysing invoices attached to Gmail messages using the Document AI. There is a bit to setup in a Cloud project to get this working and as a paid for service costs to consider. Further information on this and all the code you need to get started are included in the source post.
