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.
Grab this automated ConvertKit Report in Google Sheets to monitor your email list growth and use it to project your future list growth.
Ben Collins shares the solution he uses to produce a daily ‘ConvertKit’ PDF report. Even if you don’t use ConvertKit this post is still worth a read as the basic model of getting data from a third party API into Google Sheets and sending a PDF summary could come in handy. Perhaps not surprising given this post comes from Ben it includes some clever Google Sheet functions to prepare and shape data.
This piece of work was both challenging and a lot of fun to produce, and it’s something I’ve wanted to get round to for a long time. Apps Script libraries are a great way to reuse work you and others have done, but you have to be careful that they don’t get out of date. Libraries that refer to other libraries are complex to keep up to date, and worst of all they may disappear or their permissions change at any time.
Google recommend you don’t use them in Add-ons, and although they focus on ‘load efficiency’ (I did a study on this a few years back and found absolutely no evidence of a measurable load penalty for libraries: see Measuring library load speed), the above are probably better reasons to bundle all the code you use in your app or Add-on.
As noted by Bruce there may be a number of reasons you might want to inline libraries as part of your Apps Script projects, particularly if you are reusing third-party libraries where there is a risk the code could disappear.
In this video you will see how you can use Google Apps Script to export a Google Sheets document as a PDF
It’s been a while since we featured a video tutorial from Chanel Greco, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been busy. In this recent tutorial from Chanel you can learn how to use Google Apps Script to export a Google Sheet as a PDF Document. You can watch this and other videos from Chanel on the saperis YouTube channel.
In this post, we’re going to look at how we can work with the responses a form user submits.
We’ll look at two main ways, 1) Getting the form responses from a Google Sheet, 2) Getting the form responses directly from a Google Form.
To show some practical uses of this, we’ll do the following:
Set up a simple problem-reporting log, which will email the relevant parties the problem in a classroom. We’ll do this via the Sheet and via the Form.
Get students’ pieces of writing submitted via a Google Form and copy them to their individual sheets, ready to have feedback added.
Set up a simple appointment system, which will update itself as people take the appointments, leaving only the available ones on the Form.
This post taken from Barrie Roberts’ latest book “Beginner’s Guide to Google Apps Script 2 – Forms“, available on Amazon here. The post covers some different ways that you can interact with Google Form responses and contains lots of useful code and tips that might be useful to other Google Apps Script developers.
I have created a handy highlighting tool using Google Sheets and Google Apps Script. The specification of this tool is very simple.
The user pastes a message into the certain cell (A2).
The tool checks if the message contains some words which listed in another dedicated sheet(Spam Word List).
The tool highlights (bold and color red) the found words in the message.
Here is a nice post demonstrating how you can use Google Apps Script to highlight keywords within a Google Sheets cell. The solution uses SpreadsheetApp.newTextStyle() to create a custom style which is then applied to part of the cell text.
Scripting in Google Sheets gives you super power, and it’s very easy to use APIs to enrich your document.
In this article I’ll show you how-to:
Create custom functions in Google Sheets
Use Clearbit API to translate a company name into a company domain
Use Apollo API to get details about a company using a company domain
Bonus: Use Google CacheService to avoid API rate limits
We recently highlighted a Medium post on How to get Linkedin profiles in Google Sheets. Here is a similar example which combines data from the Clearbit and Apollo to return company information including other social media urls and more.
Image credit: Alexis Laporte
Some great tips in this post including using the Cache Service, find out more via the source link 👇.
Apps script code to manage CSV files input and output for hash code 2022 of Google.
This post from Stéphane Giron provides some very useful Google Apps Script snippets for working with .CSV data files. Included in the post are ways to:
Retrieve CSV files with Apps Script and read data;
Treating CSV files; and
Create output CSV files
As a bonus the post shows you how you can create a backup text file of your apps script file.
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.
