Create a reusable settings page in Google Sheets, using Apps Script, where configurations are easily accessible, even to those without a coding background.
I’ve not seen the numbers but would imagine the majority of Google Apps Script projects are script bound to Google Sheets. Google Sheets provide a useful data canvas which is familiar to users, which can also be used to quickly interface your script solutions. You could of course use dialogs and sidebars combined with the Properties Service to collect and store settings, but coding these in HTML/JavaScript can be time consuming.
This post from Dimitris Paxinos includes a nice Apps Script code pattern for getting and setting user settings from a Google Sheets tab. This includes some nice features including in memory storage and methods to use Script Properties. The post includes an accompanying video which explains the code should you need additional help understanding this solution.
Alright, folks, we’re talking about something quite hot off the press in the realm of Google Apps Script — “Smart Chips.” This feature is available within Google Docs and can build previews of pasted links using the Card Service. Think of it as a little preview window of what lies beyond the link — a sneak peek, if you will. 🕵️♂️
Editor: Smart chips are a recent feature in Google Workspace that help you quickly insert information into your Docs and Sheets. They can be used to insert people, places, dates, and more. It’s also possible for Google Workspace developers to publish their on ‘Preview links’ smart chips as Workspace Add-ons. In this post from Dmitry Kostyuk you can learn about publishing your own smart chips and some creative ways to get the data you need using Google Apps Script.
This is a sample script for retrieving and putting values for PDF Forms using Google Apps Script.
We’ve featured a couple of posts from Kanshi Tanaike on Pulse with solutions for handling/manipulating PDF Documents with Google Apps Script. This post on retrieving values from PDF Documents is just one in a series of recent contributions from Kanshi looking at how Google Apps Script can be used with PDFs:
Learn how to automatically transcribe audio and video files in Gmail messages with the help of OpenAI speech recognition API and Google Apps Script
Amit Agarwal highlights a no-code solution for transcribing audio in Gmail attachments available in his ‘Save Gmail to Google Drive’ Google Sheets Add-on. As part of this he shares the code and tips for transcribing audio files using OpenAI’s Whisper API. When you look at the snippet provided you’ll see once the audio file is in Google Drive it is very easy to use the Whisper API to get a transcript.
Text-to-speech services aren’t new, but approaches and larger training datasets are improving accuracy and if you prefer to work in the Google ecosystem you can find out more about Cloud Speech-to-Text.
The following Google Apps Script is designed to automatically close a Google Form once it has reached the number of responses you specify.
Use Apps Script code to automatically close a Google Form
Do you ever create a Google Form and then forget to close it? Or maybe you want to limit the number of responses that a form can receive? If so, you can automatically close a Google Form once it has reached the number of responses you specify with this example Google Apps Script.
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
Get Google Form responses for checkbox-type questions and perform further actions depending on their values.
Get all checkbox responses from a Form
The following Google Apps Script is an example of one way to get the responses from a Checkbox-type question on a Google Form and how you might go about differentiating them.
This came up for a project I was working on where I need to put a Yes/No value into 3 separate Google Sheet cells based on 3 options in a question. The slight challenge is that all of the responses come out as a single array for this question, containing the strings of the values that have been ticked only.
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
Bulk read and write a number of key-value pairs in the User Properties store. Extract to an Object for ease of use elsewhere in your code.
Access User Properties and put the values into an Object
The following Google Apps Script is a few snippets of some larger code where I needed to write (and then later read back) a number of User Properties in one go. Rather than creating multiple single write requests it is more efficient to do this in bulk.
I also needed a way to bulk read/extract these values later so I implemented a JavaScript Object that would allow me to easily call the Property name and get its value in return.
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
Search a date range in Google Calendar and match any events with a given string, then delete those events.
Search for and delete Google Calendar events
The following Google Apps Script is designed to search a date range for Google Calendar events containing a given string (something to help target those events) and then delete them.
There are 4 items at the beginning of the script to complete for your requirements:
Start date – format mm/dd/yyyy – forms the date range to look for events within.
End date – format mm/dd/yyyy – forms the date range to look for events within.
Search string – bit of text that is unique to the events you wish to delete to differentiate them from other Calendar events you may not wish to remove. Note: is not case-sensitive and will not pick-up search string inside of another word eg ‘the’ in ‘there’.
Calendar ID – typically your email address for your personal Google Calendar to search for events in.
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
This is a sample script for opening and closing Google Forms on time using Google Apps Script.
Here’s a handy little snippet if you would like to programmatically open/close one of your Google Forms to responses for specific hours of the day. The script includes another trigger that will repeat opening/closing the Google Form for responses each day. As this snippet uses .timeBased().at(date) it’s easy for you to modify if you want to only have the form open to responses between two specific dates/times.
