If your organisation is using Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise, or one of the other supported plans, you are likely taking advantage of the power of Google’s Shared Drives.
If you have decided to create a Google Apps Script project that needs to get a list of your Shared Drive (or a user’s shared drives in the case of a WebApp), then you might be scratching your head right now wondering how to get this list using the built-in DriveApp class.
Whelp, unfortunately, at the time of writing this article the DriveApp class does not have this functionality. However, it is pretty easy to access in a single line of code using an Advance API.
It is easy to search and replace text in Google Documents with the DocumentApp service of Google Apps Script. You can use use findText method with simple regular expressions to find text elements in the document that match a pattern and replace them with the specified text. All well and good but in some cases, this simple search and replace function may fail if the search text does not transform into a valid regular expression.
Some more regex goodness this time from Amit Agarwal who provides some very useful tips on escaping characters when using the DocumentApp service and findText method. Click through to the source link for more details.
Google Apps Script is handy, and it will help you a lot in your work. However, as you use it, you may hit a big wall. That is the six-minute limit on execution time. As the official documentation states, the maximum allowed time per execution of Google Apps Script is 6 minutes.
If the script execution time reaches 6 minutes, the script will stop suddenly, and an error message “Exceeded maximum execution time” will be displayed.
For as long as Google Apps Script has been around there have been various solutions published for handling the 6 minute execution limit. This post from Inclu Cat presents a nice overview and solution for the execution limit.
While working on Sheets Workbook functions – converted to Apps Script I realized that I’d need to tackle the query language at some point, so I figured I may as well go the whole hog and implement a comprehensive SQL variant for Apps Script. Luckily though, I found alasql so with a few tweaks it was ready to go!
A couple Google Apps Script community contributors have shared solutions for using the AlaSQL.js library. Latest come from Bruce Mcpherson, which is included as the source link. If you use Bruce’s fiddler library his post is worth checking out as he provides examples showing how both libraries can be used together. Another version of AlaSQL.js you should look at is Alex Ivanov’s AlaSQLGS which also includes some data and code samples.
Learn how to sort your data in a Google Sheet in randomized order using Excel formulas and Google Apps Script.
Nice little snippet from Amit Agarwal which includes some Google Apps Script code for randomising the order of rows in Google Sheets. The code has some clever use of .autoFillToNeighbor(), .offset() and .sort().
Keep up to date with any feed by having new posts published to a Google Chat room using Apps Script and Webhooks. Feeds included in this example are various official Google blogs.
This is a nice solution developed by Justin Wexler which provides an easy solution which can monitor a list of blogs and post any updates to a Google Chat room. The source post provides more detail on setup and how to use the code with your own Google Chat rooms. The code also provides a useful pattern for monitoring updates from RSS feeds.
In large organizations, it’s overwhelming for admins to find inactive users in the User List of Google Admin Console. These inactive users have not been logged in their Google accounts for a long period. It imposes a potential security risk to the organizational data if these accounts are not taken care of. A free apps script to print all inactive users in Google Workspace. The following open source Google Apps Script can automate the process of printing inactive users in your domain.
Nice little snippet from xFanatical. Check out the source link for all the code and instructions for using.
Currently it is unknown if the checklist can be manipulated in Docs. Clark Lind suggests to replace a list item with a copy of one of them (which is in expected state – check/uncheck)
A nice example of the Google Apps Script developer community helping each other out. In this case Alexander Ivanov was looking for a way to interact with the new Google Docs checklist feature. A direct way to interact with these isn’t possible but some clever coding from Alex demonstrates what is currently possible.
This is a sample script for creating the colorful buttons on Google Spreadsheet on Google Apps Script.
There are some interesting features in this script example, combining the use of Google Slides to create buttons and then assigning a script function to the result using the .assignScript() method.
Learn how the Google Tables Apps Script Bot works and see an example of data enrichment using the Mattermark API.
In this post, I’ll show you how to use the new Google Tables Apps Script Bot. When something happens in your Google Table – a new row, or a value changes – a bot can be set to trigger an Apps Script function. It opens up a world of new possibilities.
While the Tables beta has been announced as joining Google Cloud it is still limited to US users. In the meantime for those outside the US we are limited to watching from the sidelines. Fortunately we can watch through the expert eyes of community members, in this case the esteemed Ben Collins. In this post Ben highlights how the experimental Tables Apps Script integration can be used to develop bots.
