If you’re a Google Workspace Super Admin, you’ve probably been thinking of ways to inventory and keep a handle on Google Shared Drives. They are a really great addition to the Workspace offering, but there are still some gaps in reporting & oversight that some people have wanted. This solution uses Google Apps Script and the Drive API to pull information about all the Shared Drives in a domain into a Google Sheet. Then, it uses the Drive API again to loop through all the drives and get the top-level permissions.
For Google Workspace admins Nick Young has provided a nice solution for auditing Google Shared Drives within your Workspace domain. This post covers all the steps to setup, a link to the code on GitHub and some notes on limitations to be aware of.
Search one level of Google Drive folders and extract creation, last updated and folder names into a Google Sheet.
Enter the Parent folder ID and search the folders within
The following Google Apps Script is designed to search through one level of Google Drive folders and extract the following information into a Google Sheet:
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
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.
Google Add-on to bulk rename Google Drive files quickly and easily in a given folder. You define exactly what you want to search for in the file name and the text to replace it with. Includes instructions and demo video.
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
An Add-on to perform a Google Drive file name search from within a Google Sheet to keep the file information saved for future use.
Search Drive file names in Google Sheets
It is easy to search for the names of files within Google Drive, but what happens when there are a lot of results that you need to go through?! Scrolling continuously down the page becomes quite clunky and frustrating, so with this tool you can perform that same search in a Google Sheet but have the results collated into the Sheet also, so they are much easier to then work with.
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
A limitation of the Drive API is that you can only share files with one user at a time. Google Apps Script is synchronous – it doesn’t support the async/await pattern of JavaScript Promises and you therefore cannot run the code in parallel.
There’s however a simple workaround to help you share a file or folder in Google Drive with multiple users in one go in parallel using the UrlFetchApp service.
On Pulse Phil recently shared a snippet for changing a Google Drive file permissions from Editor to Viewer. In this example for Amit Agarwal you can see how you can make these types of changes for multiple users without slowing down your script execution time.
How to change Google Drive file permissions from Editor to Viewer as said user.
The following Google Apps Script is designed to change the Google Drive file permissions of a specific user from Editor to Viewer. The function actually came about when needing to end a process where a user had been editing a Google Sheet on a Shared drive that they should only then have Viewer access to. To complicate matters the Apps Script code is running as said user when it needs to reduce their own permissions.
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
Learn how to instantly share newly enrolled teachable students to Google Drive files and folders with Google Sheets and Apps Script.
Scott ‘Yagi’ Donald provides a very thorough walk-through of how he has connected a webhook from a third party service to Google Sheets to share specific Google Drive folders and files with named users. This post is well worth a visit as it contains a number of tips and tricks like using Google Forms to follow-up with user email addresses that are not associated with a Google account.
Convert a Google Doc into a PDF in a given folder and optionally delete the original Doc file.
The following Google Apps Script is designed to create a PDF file of a Google Doc in a Drive folder that you specify, with the option to delete the original Doc. This snippet of code is from larger developed solutions and allows you to understand and replicate the process.
This post is somewhat of an updated version of this Convert Doc to PDF and move into a new folder blog post. Whilst the code in it still works it was part of my early days of learning Apps Script and it was also when Google allowed for files to exist in more than one place (a feature now replaced by Shortcuts).
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
Maximum runtime – in order to prevent the tool from reaching the limits imposed by Google you can adjust the number of minutes the tool can run for. Change this in the ‘GlobalVariables.gs’ file in the Script Editor.
Continue from where it left off – if you have a lot of Google folders and files to handle and the above runtime is reached the tool will complete the current row/folder and prompt you to run it again, without duplicating any folders or files already created.
Popups – as well as the ‘Log’ sheet the tool displays a direct popup to the user if it encounters a problem.
Full naming control – you have the ability to tweak every single folder and file name that is created by the tool. See the Concatenate section below to understand the true power of this.
Clickable links – created by the tool which means you can navigate directly to the new folders and files directly from the Google Sheet.
Add more files – the tool currently has columns for 10 files to be added to each folder, but you can actually append more as long as you follow the same convention of 2 columns per file (1 file name and 1 file ID). Do this before you run the tool as you cannot add more files to a folder once it has been created.
Add more folders – after running the tool you can either choose to clear all of the data within it (use the ‘Reset sheets’ option from the ‘Admin’ menu) and start again or you can simply append further rows/folders and re-run without any duplication (if the ‘Folder Link’ column is not blank/empty then it will skip that row).
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
