AppsScriptPulse

Solutions, Admin SDK, Sheets, V8, Intermediate

List all users of a Google Workspace domain, remove inactive users and force reset users’ passwords – Digital Inspiration

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Amit Agarwal has recently been busy continuing to publish lots of incredibly useful Google Apps Script tips and snippets on his ‘Digital Inspiration’ blog. Three recent posts might be of particular interest to Google Workspace administrators:

[This Google Apps] Scripts gets the name and email address of users in the organization and saves the list inside a Google Spreadsheet. This script can only be executed by the domain administrator.

Source: List All Users of a Google Workspace Domain in Google Sheets – Digital Inspiration

Learn how the Google Workspace admin can change the Google account passwords of multiple users in their organization automatically with Google Apps Script.

Source: How to Force Reset Google Workspace Users’ Passwords with Apps Script – Digital Inspiration

Learn how to find inactive users in your Google Workspace domain and delete the dormant accounts to save on your monthly bills.

Source: Find and Remove Inactive Users in your Google Workspace Domain – Digital Inspiration

Solutions, Sheets, V8, Beginner

How to build an automated PDF report in Google Sheets using Apps Script 

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Grab this automated ConvertKit Report in Google Sheets to monitor your email list growth and use it to project your future list growth.

Ben Collins shares the solution he uses to produce a daily ‘ConvertKit’ PDF report. Even if you don’t use ConvertKit this post is still worth a read as the basic model of getting data from a third party API into Google Sheets and sending a PDF summary could come in handy. Perhaps not surprising given this post comes from Ben it includes some clever Google Sheet functions to prepare and shape data.

Source: Automated ConvertKit Report In Google Sheets

Solutions, V8, Advanced

Pull libraries inline to your Google Apps Script project – Desktop Liberation

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Inline converter

This piece of work was both challenging and a lot of fun to produce, and it’s something I’ve wanted to get round to for a long time.  Apps Script libraries are a great way to reuse work you and others have done, but you have to be careful that they don’t get out of date. Libraries that refer to other libraries are complex to keep up to date, and worst of all they may disappear or their permissions change at any time.

Google recommend you don’t use them in Add-ons, and although they focus on ‘load efficiency’ (I did a study on this a few years back and found absolutely no evidence of a  measurable load penalty for libraries: see  Measuring library load speed), the above are probably better reasons to bundle all the code you use in your app or Add-on.

This builds on the work from Import, export and mix container bound and standalone Apps Script projects and I release it as a library (which you can of course use to inline it to your own project if you want!)

As noted by Bruce there may be a number of reasons you might want to inline libraries as part of your Apps Script projects, particularly if you are reusing third-party libraries where there is a risk the code could disappear.

Source: Pull libraries inline to your Apps Script project – Desktop Liberation

Solutions, Forms, Sheets, V8, Beginner

Apps Script Basics – Using Form Responses – Learning Google Workspace & Apps Script

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In this post, we’re going to look at how we can work with the responses a form user submits.

We’ll look at two main ways, 1) Getting the form responses from a Google Sheet, 2) Getting the form responses directly from a Google Form.

To show some practical uses of this, we’ll do the following:

  1. Set up a simple problem-reporting log, which will email the relevant parties the problem in a classroom. We’ll do this via the Sheet and via the Form.
  2. Get students’ pieces of writing submitted via a Google Form and copy them to their individual sheets, ready to have feedback added.
  3. Set up a simple appointment system, which will update itself as people take the appointments, leaving only the available ones on the Form.

This post taken from Barrie Roberts’ latest book “Beginner’s Guide to Google Apps Script 2 – Forms“, available on Amazon here. The post covers some different ways that you can interact with Google Form responses and contains lots of useful code and tips that might be useful to other Google Apps Script developers.

Source: Apps Script Basics – Using Form Responses – Learning Google Workspace & Apps Script

Solutions, Sheets, V8, Beginner

[Google Sheets] Word Highlighter (made using Google Apps Script)

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I have created a handy highlighting tool using Google Sheets and Google Apps Script. The specification of this tool is very simple.

  1. The user pastes a message into the certain cell (A2).
  2. The tool checks if the message contains some words which listed in another dedicated sheet(Spam Word List).
  3. The tool highlights (bold and color red) the found words in the message.

Here is a nice post demonstrating how you can use Google Apps Script to highlight keywords within a Google Sheets cell. The solution uses  SpreadsheetApp.newTextStyle() to create a custom style which is then applied to part of the cell text.

Source: [Google Sheets] Word Highlighter

Solutions, Drive, V8, Beginner

Code preparation for Hash Code 2022 with Apps Script [snippets for working with .CSV data files]

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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.

Source: Code preparation for Hash Code 2022 with Apps Script

Solutions, V8, Intermediate

Import, export and mix container bound and standalone Google Apps Script projects – Desktop Liberation

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This article covers how to pull scripts from multiple projects and import them into another project. You can even use this to make container bound script standalone, or visa versa. … This article will cover the library that does all that, along with various other usage examples – for example, pulling in code snippets from or libraries, merging manifests, or testing add-ons.

Some more magic from Bruce Mcpherson this time creating and documenting a library that can be used to copy/replace scripts. Bruce’s illustrates this with an example of pushing a standalone script to a container bound Google Sheet project and I’m sure you can find many other ways this could be useful to maintain script projects.

Source: Import, export and mix container bound and standalone Apps Script projects – Desktop Liberation

Solutions, Sheets, V8, Beginner

How to get Linkedin profiles [and other Google Custom Search results] in Google Sheets with a formula

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Image credit: Giacomo Melzi

Some time ago, I made a custom Google Sheets formula to automatically get the Linkedin profile of a person/company. It can be helpful to anyone using Google Sheets as a CRM or recruitment, product feedback, or marketing tool. It saved me a lot of boring copy/pasting, so hopefully, it can save some time for you as well

Interesting project from Giacomo Melzi that uses the Google Custom Search API to search LinkedIn for personal and company profile pages. As noted by Giacomo:

Since Linkedin profiles are behind a login (you have to be logged in to check someone’s profile), the formula relies on a workaround. The script performs a domain-constrained search via the Google Custom Search API.

That’s something anyone can do manually in a standard Google search. Just try adding site:{domain} before your search query, and your results will be filtered by domain.

This technique can be used on other sites that are behind a login but indexed by Google. A couple of important limitations to be aware of, in particular, free quota limits. Check out the source post for more details and the code to run this yourself.

Source: How to get Linkedin profiles in Google Sheets with a formula

Add-on, Solutions, Sheets, V8, Advanced

Google Workspace Editor Add-on for encrypting/decrypting columns in Google Sheets – Desktop Liberation

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In ‘Merging sheets from multiple sources and encrypting selected columns’ I published some code for selectively copying columns from multiple input spreadsheets/sheets to create summary sheets, and optionally encrypting columns. The idea was to distribute the same sheet to multiple people, along with private key(s) to decrypt columns to which they should have access. This seems a pretty handy thing to make into an Editor Add-on. I’m too impatient and life’s too short to bother getting into the Add-on publishing process, so I haven’t officially released this one personally, but here is a fully functional decryption Add-on that any of you are welcome to fiddle with and publish yourself.

Having previously featured some of Bruce Mcphersons previous posts on encrypting/decrypting Google Sheets data it seems fitting to share the post containing the final add-on. Even if you are not interested in the add-on’s functionality this post can still be worth a look to see how Bruce structures an add-on and uses Vue and Vuex to create the UI rendered with HTMLService.

Source: Add-on for decrypting columns in Google Sheets – Desktop Liberation

V8, Intermediate, Sheets, Slides

How to Create Dynamic Open Graph Images with Google Sheets [and Google Apps Script] – Digital Inspiration

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Generate dynamic Open Graph images for your website with Google Sheets without requiring Puppeteer. All pages on your website can have their own unique Open Graph images created from a Google Slides template.

As explained by Amit Agarwal Open Graph images are included as a feature image on social media sites when the link is shared. You can use static images but some sites like Github dynamically create an image that includes additional information.

For example, if you were to share the link to the Google Workspace Solutions Github repo on Twitter an image is automictically displayed containing information like the number of contributors, issues, stars and forks:

Google Solutions - Open Graph from Github

To generate these images often a headless browser solution like Puppeteer is used. In this example from Amit he shows how a Google Slides template and a little Google Apps Script can be used to batch create similar open graph images.

Source: How to Create Dynamic Open Graph Images with Google Sheets – Digital Inspiration