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.
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: www.pbainbridge.co.uk
Make a Room availability dasboard for your Google Workspace domain wihtin a minute with onleetable and Google Apps Script
This post from Stéphane Giron caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Besides a quick and easy solution for displaying room availability in an attractive table as a bonus you can see/copy the script Stéphane uses to extract calendar data into a Google Sheet. Follow the source link for the code and more details.
📅 A free and open source web app to make it easy for others to schedule with you –
Features
🌐 Create a unique link that others can use to book an appointment on your Google Calendar
📑 Offer mulitple types of meetings, each with their own configurable timeframe and event settings
📒 Place events on any calendar you have edit access to
📆 Confirm availability against multiple calendars
🤖 Intelligent suggestion of available free times on both your and (if accessible) the scheduling party’s calendar
🔗 URL parameters to bring the user to a specific meeting type and prefill their email1
⚡ Send a webhook push to integrate with IFTTT, Zapier, and more when an event is scheduled
🌈 Configurable accent color
🌙 Automatic light and dark mode
💳 No premium tier. 100% free.
This Apps Script solution comes thanks to a tweet from Sourabh Choraria (@choraria) highlighting a open source project from Leo Herzog which lets to deploy a highly customisable Google Calendar appointment scheduling app. The solution uses a nice JavaScript library for handling dates/times which you might find useful to include in your own projects called Luxon.
🏝 It’s finally summer break! We all wish we could create Out Of Office events in Calendar using Google Workspace #AppsScript (I know you do). But Calendar API is yet not allowing us to do so.
This post from Dararath BEAUVOIR is a great reminder that in Google Workspace/Apps Script development that you occasionally need to look beyond the built-in services like CalendarApp to the Advance Service equivalents. In this case Calendar.CalendarList.list is used because unlike CalendarApp using the Advanced Service the event response indicated if the eventType is out-of-office. More details are included in the source post.
While curbside pickup of recyclables is convenient, it does require you to keep track of which type of waste is picked up when: miss the biweekly paper pickup and you’ll soon find yourself stockpiling four weeks’ worth of boxes and newspapers. When [Dominic Buchstaller]’s stack of cardboard began to reach his ceiling, he decided to take action by building himself BinPal: a fridge magnet that helps you remember when to take out which bin.
At heart of the simple but effective BinPal is an ESP32 board that connects to Google Apps Script and retrieves the pickup schedule from Google Calendar. If one of four categories of waste is due for pickup, its icon is highlighted on an LCD screen.
BinPal is an entry to the 2022 Hackday Prize which uses Google Apps Script to return Google Calendar data to an IoT device. The project page for BinPal has instructions and all the files to remake, including the file for laser-cutting/engraving the front plate. Browsing the Apps Script file for the project you’ll see it is a basic web app which returns data from a named calendar. Hackday challenges are open for set dates throughout the year so there is still a chance to submit your own projects – visit hackaday.io/prize for more info.
Learn how to setup a video meeting inside Google Meet with the Google Calendar API and Apps Script. This Apps Script sample shows how you can programmatically schedule video meetings inside Google Meet with one or more participants using the Google Calendar API. It can be useful for teachers who wish to schedule regular meetings with their students but instead of manually creating meeting invites, they can easily automate the whole process for the entire class.
We’ve featured a couple of Google Meet scheduling solutions in Pulse[1,2]. This latest example from Amit Agarwal includes some nice code examples for additional optional parameters that can be used when using Google Calendar as an Advanced Service (Calendar.Events.insert). These include:
attendees[].responseStatus – for setting the attendee’s response status;
reminders.overrides[] – to override default event reminders and pops; and
recurrence[] – creating a custom recurrence for the calendar event
Amit includes some very useful examples of recurrence rules, using the RRULE notation. As well as RRULE the recurrence property can also accept RDATE and EXDATE values for further occurrence customisation.
In this article, I will show you how can you visualize google calendar events in the google maps using Google Calendar, Maps Javascript API, HTML, CSS and Google Apps Script.
This is an interesting project shared by Kevin Vaghasiya which uses Google Apps Script to create a web app to display a range of Google Calendar events on a map. On the backend the script is using the Maps Service and geocode(address) to get the co-ordinates of the event location. This could be an interesting project to modify to send yourself a daily email with a static map image of your appointments.
If you have tried to seamlessly subscribe a user to a Google Calendar as part of an automation workflow in Google Apps Script and discovered that all that happens is that the user gets an automated email request to join, and then it is up to them to accept the calendar invitation to add it to their live calendar list, you’re in the right place. … How to force subscribe a user in your domain to a Google Calendar using Google Apps Script and Service Accounts.
Scott Donald always crams in lots of very useful tips and guidance in his posts. In this latest piece by Scott you as well as learning about the Google Calendar Advanced Service you can also learn about service accounts and domain wide delegation setup, which enables super powers (and responsibilities). If you are interested in learning more about service accounts in Google Cloud Console Scott has included a selection of other community contributions at the end of his post.
const event = CalendarApp.getEventById('some_event_id');
const guestList = event.getGuestList(true); // get the guest list including owner
// Iterate across EventGuest[]
for (let i = 0; i < guestList.length; i++){
let guest = guestList[i].getEmail();
let status = guestList[i].getGuestStatus().toString();
Logger.log(guest + ' ' + status);
}
However, in practice as the organiser status defaults to ‘Yes’ and can change to ‘No’ or ‘Maybe’ the OWNER status is never returned:
How to solve? Well one solution to find the owner is to get the event guest list with and without the owner then filter out the list ignoring any accounts that appear twice:
const event = CalendarApp.getEventById('some_event_id);
const guestList = event.getGuestList(true); // get the guest list including owner
const guestListWithoutOwner = event.getGuestList(); // get the guest list without the owner
// filter the guest list to ingore duplicate emails leaving only the owner
// based on https://stackoverflow.com/a/42995029/1027723
const owner = guestList.filter(o1 => !guestListWithoutOwner.some(o2 => o1.getEmail() === o2.getEmail()));
Logger.log('The owner is: ' + owner[0].getEmail());
Alternatively if the Calendar Advanced Service is enabled in your Apps Script project the owner email can be returned using:
// With Calendar Advanced Service enabled
// Note: eventId is different to the one returned by CalendarApp as it doesn't include @google.com
// See https://stackoverflow.com/a/55545091/1027723 for how to handle
const event = Calendar.Events.get(CalendarApp.getDefaultCalendar().getId(), 'some_event_id');
Logger.log('The owner is: ' + event.organizer.email);
Clearly the second method is more direct, but which is quicker? I’ll let you tell me :)
