You use Google Sheets as your own Podcast Manager that will automatically download your favorite podcasts to Google Drive and instantly sync across all your devices.
Amit Agarwal is always coming up with creative uses for Google Apps Script. His latest project is a great example of what can be achieved with a little code and a lot of know-how. Even if you aren’t a podcast fan this project is worth checking out as Amit is expert at writing concise and efficient code.
Some highlights to check out once you make a copy of the ‘Podcast Manager’ Google Sheet are use of CacheService for getting/putting a last update time and using the .filter(Boolean) trick for ignoring blank cells when using .getValues() on Google Sheets data. There is plenty more going on and worth spending some time using the Script Editor debugger and breakpoints to learn from a master.
Fortunately, Kanshi Tanaike has been exploring the impact the increased volume of data in Google Sheets has when using Google Apps Script and both SpreadsheetApp and Sheets API. The linked report contains a number of useful findings and strategies for handling large Google Sheets with Apps Script.
If you run and maintain an Open Source project you’ll typically will want to keep track of things like your downloads, stars, commits over time, etc. to help you gauge engagement and overall health of your project. Here’s a quick way hack to keep track of some of this data in Google Sheet which will help you simplify the collection of data and help you better understand what that data means for your project.
This post was picked up by the official @WorkspaceDevs Twitter account, which has been highlighting and amplifying more community contributions recently (hint: you may want to follow/tag the account :)
The two things that caught my eye in this post. First, was the pattern used to get stats from multiple GitHub repos which are all appended in the same row (repo 1 cols B-F and repo 2 cols G-H).
Image credit: Codenotary
As a bit of a REST API/auth geek the second thing that interested me was the use of the Acceptheader, used by GitHub to specify the REST API version being called in UrlFetchApp.
In this post we’re going to look at how we can get data from an Excel spreadsheet and import some of it into a Google Sheet. As an example, we’re going to upload an Excel which contains the current month’s royalty data from Amazon and add it to a central sheet which contains all the previous month’s royalties.
Similar to the post on converting a PDF document to text, this tutorial from Baz Roberts uses a similar approach of using the Google Drive API for file conversion, this time converting a MS Excel file into Google Sheets to make it possible to easily extract and update a master spreadsheet. The post includes a detailed explanation of the shared code.
Learn about the different approaches that will help insert images in Google Sheets and understand the reason why you may prefer one approach over the other.
In this tutorial Amit Agarwal covers the various ways you can insert images into Google Sheets, including with Google Apps Script. As part of this you can learn about the CellImage and CellImageBuilder which are relatively new features for adding an image to a Google Sheets cell. There are some useful code snippets included in the tutorial that can be dropped into your own projects.
enumerate a range in google sheets using google apps script and use that to find precedents of cells that contain a formula.
Let’s start with the ubiquity of spreadsheets. I’ve long felt that spreadsheets were everywhere but until a post from Hjalmar Gislason I had never seen it in numbers and it made for interesting reading:
1.2 billion people use Microsoft Office (WindowsCentral, March 2016), odds are most of them have at least access to Microsoft Excel.
Excel is the number one skill mentioned in job ads, mentioned in approximately 1 in 3 job ads! (Indeed.com Job Trends, June 2017).
In 2010, RescueTime found that about 25% of computer users used Excel on a daily basis and that about 2% of all time spent on a computer anywhere was spent using Microsoft Excel.
As useful as spreadsheets are the underlying data structure can cause problems. This is covered in more detail in Patrick Burns’ Spreadsheet Addiction, which amongst other things highlights the ambiguity of value and formula:
Primarily the problem is that some cells have hidden meaning. When you see a number in a cell, you don’t know if that is a pure number or a number that is derived from a formula in the cell. While this distinction is usually immaterial, it can be critical.
The leading example is sorting. When rows are sorted, usually it is desired to sort the numbers as they are. However, it will be the formulas that are sorted. To humans the numbers are the primary thing, and the formulas are just something in the background. To the spreadsheet the formulas are primary, and the numbers are mere results.
This is a long winded way to highlight some work from Sourabh Choraria which is exploring how the relationship between formulas and cells can be extracted in Google Sheets. As part of this Sourabh is looking at how the getFormulasR1C1 method in SpreadsheetApp can be processed to find precedent cells. There are some very funky use of regex to parse formulas which is worth spending some time to digest.
In this blog, I am going to show you how to get Google Classroom Data into your Google Sheet using Google Apps Script. Using this, you can keep track of all the classes that you have in your Google Classroom.
This is a nice introductory tutorial from Aryan Irani which looks at exporting basic information about your Google Classroom courses to Google Sheets. The example script imports the main details about your courses but if you are interested in finding out what else is available the official documentation for a course resource outlines what else is available.
Make Google Sheets as your database for your web app or add-on developed in Apps Script without sharing the file. … In order to keep our database secret to end users we will use a Service Account (SA) … This Service Account is not a real account, no Gmail or Drive attached but a service account can access a spreadsheet. We will use this property to manage our data.
As the post author Stéphane Giron indicates before using Google Sheets as a database you need to fully scope out if it’s the right solution for you. For ‘small’ data you can often get away with using Sheets and in this post from Stéphane you can learn how to do it in a way where you can have access control by setting up and using a Service Account.
There have been a few instances in my work where I need to remove a button (more accurately, a button drawing) or and image from a Google Sheets tab once the associated script has been run.
Perhaps we just want the user to run a process on a Google Sheet workbook, just once but not more times. This would be a good case for removing the button or drawing after use.
Note: This tutorial expects that you know how to create a drawing or a button from the Google Sheets drawing tool.
In this report, I would like to introduce to apply the spread syntax and the destructuring assignment to Google Spreadsheet with Google Apps Script. … I have sometimes gotten the questions related to the spread syntax and the destructuring assignment. So, I thought that I would like to introduce in my blog.
We’ve featured other coding patterns from Kanshi Tanaike and here is some other nice examples of how you can handle 2D arrays returned by .getValues(), in particular, this post shows a nice way of getting non-adjacent columns in Google Sheets.
