As a Developer Advocate for Google Workspace, I live and breathe productivity tools. But even the most tech-savvy among us can have frustratingly simple oversights. My recurring pain point? Forgetting to turn on my Gmail vacation responder to automatically notify people of my absence before heading out of office.
Google Workspace Developer Advocate, Chanel Greco, has shared a clever solution to automate their Gmail out-of-office notification using Google Apps Script. Faced with the recurring problem of forgetting to set up the out-of-office notification, Chanel crafted a script that does the job based on Google Calendar events marked as ‘outOfOffice’.
Chanel’s project not only solves a personal problem but also demonstrates the benefits of Google Apps Script for task customization and productivity. By harnessing the power of Workspace APIs, you can create innovative solutions to automate routine tasks and streamline workflows.
This report introduces the method for managing the histories of the Google Apps Script project.
On August 23, 2023, the project history has been implemented in the new IDE of Google Apps Script. In the current stage, the users can see the history of the previously deployed script version. … In the case of the classic IDE, the users had been able to see the previously saved script version regardless of the deployment and just the save of the script. This is not implemented in the new IDE.
In August 2023, Google updated the online Apps Script Editor adding a feature which lets you view previously deployed script versions and compare them to the current script version. A current limitation the history is limited to versioned deployments. As noted in this source post from Kanshi Tanaike, deployments require several steps and you have to remember to go through the process. To make the process easier Kanshi has published a ScriptHistoryApp library, which can be used to create a custom web interface for making your own Apps Script project version history. Perhaps more usefully you can also manage snapshots of your script projects by fetching a URL. This makes it easy for you to either regularly save a project on a timed trigger or an event based mechanism.
Google Apps Script can be executed by time-driven triggers. This is one of the very important points for taking cloud computing. But, the scenarios using time-driven triggers are different for each user, and there are a lot of situations for using time-driven triggers. But, when a script for implementing time-driven triggers is developed, each script is different and complicated. In this report, I would like to introduce easily managing time-driven triggers using a Google Apps Script library.
In Google Apps Script time-driven triggers are a powerful way to automate tasks including Google Sheets. However, managing them can be difficult, especially if you have a lot of triggers and need triggers to run at different times and frequencies. The TriggerApp library from Kanshi Tanaike makes this a lot easier and this post includes a number of examples that are easy to copy/modify for your own script projects. The post covers the following scenarios:
Execute 2 functions at specific dates and times
Execute a function with a specific cycle between specific times between specific dates
Execute 3 functions with a specific cycle between specific times on weekdays
Send an email on a birthday every year
Execute specific functions on specific weekdays in a week
Execute 6 different functions every 10 minutes from “09:00:00” to “11:50:00” in order
Opening hours of Google Form from 09:00 to 17:00 on Weekdays
Opening Hours of Google Spreadsheet from 09:00 to 17:00 on Weekdays
Execute specific functions at 09:00 on Monday to Friday at the beginning of specific months
The source code for the library is on GitHub and includes documentation on all the methods it uses.
This report introduces the method for easily processing the template of Google Documents and Google Slides using Google Spreadsheet as a database using Google Apps Script. Google Spreadsheet is used as a database. Google Documents and Google Slides are used as templates. The simple method for creating new Google Documents and Google Slides using the database and the templates is introduced.
Latest Apps Script magic from Kanshi Tanaike, this time they turn their addition to an easy way to use data from Google Sheets as a ‘document merge’ for templates created in Google Docs and Google Slides. This is achieved by using the TemplateApp Apps Script library, which has lots of useful features including simply methods for sheetRangeToDocuments() as well as the ability to embeded and fixed width images from placeholders. There are some llimitations documented in the GitHub repo, as well as examples for all the methods available in the library.
