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.
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
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.
In this article I’ll show you how to setup reminder emails that will get sent automatically each day if there are any pending tasks in your spreadsheet. Stay tuned until the end, where I’ll show you an easier way to accomplish this using Coda.
Eric Koleda must be the undisputed master of the Apps Script demo. The ‘random cat’ Add-on, is one of my favourite examples where Eric finds a really simple hook to get you engaged in what can often be a complex project. Eric is now Developer Advocate at Coda and he’s not lost is eye. In this post Eric gives the gift of script with a basic example of how you can handle email notifications from Google Form responses in batches with a timed trigger (cats being replaced for cakes). Eric also shows how a no-code alternative can be accomplished in Coda.
Let’s jump off the new tech bandwagon and use 40 year old technology. VisiCalc, arguably the first spreadsheet software, is now available inside of Google Sheets. Just like it was installed on an Apple II. Enjoy the 80’s era, Chiptune-esque, 8 bit-ish VisiCalc emulator inside of Google Sheets.
For those not around in 1979 VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet computer program for PCs. There is a great Wikipedia article with information about VisiCalc which highlights:
VisiCalc is one of the earliest examples of metaphor-driven user interface design, due to its resemblance with paper spreadsheets. Compared to paper spreadsheets, VisiCalc freed users to change numbers without having to recalculate the whole spreadsheet by hand, which, according to Steven Levy, “changed the perception of a spreadsheet from a document of hard costs into a modelling tool by which one tested business scenarios”.
Having a play with VisiCalc 2023 my immediate thought is why doesn’t Google Sheets have a native dark mode on desktop devices. Just one of the many things they got right is 1979. Andrew has included some other lovely touches including a product serial number (remember to keep this in a safe place), and a print command.
If you are on Twitter and would like to share your VisiCalc memories or reflections headover to this thread.
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.
This is a sample script for the folder picker using jsTree with Google Apps Script and Javascript.
The Google Picker is a file picker that allows users to select files from Google Drive which can be used in your Apps Script projects (See Using Google Picker with Google Apps Script). The Picker is good but there are certain scenarios where the functionality isn’t available, one I’ve personally found is selecting the My Drive or Shared drive root. Here’s an alternative approach from Kanshi Tanaike for an alternative folder picker created using jsTree. In the post you’ll find more information plus how you can use this solution with a service account.
