Learn how to search and find all values in an entire Google Sheet spreadsheet, in a specific sheet tab or in a range with Apps Script.
Handy little snippet from Scott Donald on using the Google Apps Script TextFinder class to find all the occurrences of matching text in a Google Sheet. The bit I particularly liked in this solution was how Scott used a .map method to return an object array of cell hits including A1 notation:
Array containing an object for each sheet containing the sheet name and the cell location (Image credit: Scott Donald)
Follow the source link for more information including a video tutorial.
These are the sample scripts for hiding and deleting rows and columns on Google Spreadsheet [sic] using Google Apps Script. I sometimes see the questions for hiding and deleting rows and columns on Spreadsheet at Stackoverflow. So here, I would like to introduce the sample scripts for this.
In SpreadsheetApp there is the .deleteRow() and .deleteRows(), but when you have a lot of data or non-consecutive rows it can really eat into your Apps Script runtime limit. In searching for a better way of doing this I found this great solution from Kanshi Tanaike on Stack Overflow which uses the Google Sheets Advanced Service to delete multiple rows using one API call!
Using Sheets.Spreadsheets.batchUpdate isn’t just limited to deleting rows and for more examples see the source post which includes examples for hiding and deleting both rows and columns.
Take a Google/Shared Drive folder full of files that you want to make a copy of and place into another set of existing Drive folders.
Bulk add files to existing Google Drive folders
The following Google Apps Script tool is designed to take a Google/Shared Drive folder full of files that you want to make a copy of and place into another set of existing Drive folders.You can decide if you want the subfolder name appending/prepending/ignoring in the file name of the new copy to help make it unique.
The tool will iterate through a single level of folders (not sub-subfolders) and for each one place a copy of the files into it.
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
ChatGPT is pretty much a universal API: one endpoint to get any data.
ChatGPT has recently taken the world by storm. Unless you have been living under a rock, then you have certainly seen a variety of content on this topic. One of its greatest advantages is its ease of use, and it is perfectly usable in Google Apps Script. With that in mind, here is one use case that we can implement: generating fake data.
Fake data is useful for testing purposes. At times, real data is too sensitive, and sometimes you do not have access to real data before production, but you need to begin working with something. Here is where fake data comes in.
We used to have a great library for fake data called Faker.js; however, Marak, the author, became so frustrated that he could not monetize the solution that he pushed an update that broke everything, which led to him being blocked on GitHub and NPM. As a result, the library is no longer maintained. ChatGPT, however, is not going anywhere.
Illustration by ahmiruddinhidayat111198 on freepik.com https://www.freepik.com/author/fahmiruddinhidayat111198
The onEdit trigger is likely the most used trigger in Google Apps Script. It runs automatically with an event object whenever you change a value in a spreadsheet — programmatic changes excluded — thus allowing you to execute a script based on context. When done properly, it can be extremely powerful. When done wrong, however, it can feel unreliable and messy.
In this article, we will learn to avoid three common pitfalls:
Not Exiting Early
Making a Single Function Do Everything
Expecting onEdit to Catch All Changes by Default
For this purpose, we will build a simple script to handle a task list in Google Sheets. It will do two things: add a checkbox next to new tasks and add a completion date when each task is checked as done.
Bulk combine multiple CSV files into a single Google Sheet, putting the data in specific locations and creating multiple tabs.
Bulk combine CSV files into a single Google Sheet
The following Google Apps Script is designed to take a number of CSV files (structured in an identical way) stored in a Google Drive folder and combine them all into a single Google Sheet file. It maps the data within the CSV file to specific cells in the Google Sheet, along with creating a tab for each of the CSV files to separate them out.
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
In this article Jahswill Essien describes how to use Google Sheets with Flutter via Google Apps Script.
This article assumes the following:
You have experience using the basics of Flutter and can call APIs and read an existing codebase
You have little to no understanding of Google Apps Script
You have some experience using Google Sheets or spreadsheets in general
I’m sure many of you reading this post will already be familiar with Google Apps Script and have little/no experience deploying Flutter apps but I also know a lot of Google Apps Script developers are keen to try new stuff.
If deploying mobile apps is a thing that interests you I’d highly recommend also looking at Google no/low code development platform, AppSheet, which enables you to quickly create/deploy apps often using Google Sheets as a backend. If, however, you need custom graphics or pixel perfect UI, solutions like Flutter would be my personal starting point. Enjoy!
Learn how to list hidden Google Sheets tabs with Google Apps Script – CODE and VIDEO tutorial with script explainers.
This post from Scott Donald is an opportunity to learn about how you can work with hidden tabs in Google Sheets with Apps Script. For beginners this post is also an opportunity to learn about the JavaScript reduce method as a way to iterate through data. As well as the code and supporting video the author Scott Donald has some related projects where you can see this solution in action.
Bulk convert Google Sheets within a given Google Drive folder into PDFs and optionally delete the original file.
Bulk convert Google Sheets to PDFs using Apps Script
Features
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 Sheets to convert and the above runtime is reached the tool will save its progress and prompt you to run it again, avoiding any file duplication.
HTML popup – as well as the ‘Log’ sheet the tool displays a direct popup to the user if it encounters a problem.
PDF counter – after successfully running the tool will include the number of PDFs created as part of the success popup to the user.
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
The problem comes when you have to load that info in your app. … The more the data, the more time to load. You could use Apps Script to schedule backups of your data.
A nice introduce into Google Apps Script with an opportunity to learn how to archive data from one Google Sheet to another. This solution comes from Mozart GarcÃa who is more often seen on YouTube producing short Google Apps Script how-to in Italian (Bravo! Mozart on recently passing 4K subscribers)
