This week was the first time I’ve tried AWS. I wanted to test AWS SES to write some emails with the help of Amazon. The learning curve was painful for me because I was totally lost in the documentation. Here’s what I came through
Max Makhrov is on a role with Google Apps Script and Google Sheets development. As well as this latest Medium post looking at Amazon AWS Simple Email Service (or as Max discovered – ‘Not so Simple Email Service’) if not already well worth following Max on Twitter (@max__makhrov) for lots of very useful Google Sheets/Script tips.
If you are hitting your quotas on Google Workspace daily email sends using AWS SES could be one solution. If you want to avoid the bold banners in recipients inboxes here’s some additional required reading on How to Set Up AWS SES and Avoid Spam Folders is essential reading. This covers setting up DNS records for SPF, DKIM, DMARC when using AWS SES. As these changes are required at a DNS level it’s not possible to set this up on regular @gmail.com accounts.
When working in a team and/or with a client, you want to have multiple environments. At minimum, you probably want a dev environment (or multiple ones) in which you are working, and a test environment in which the client or your team can run acceptance tests before production. Of course, they must both be separate from the production environment. To push your code to the correct environment, you need to either update the .clasp.json file manually or keep multiple copies of your script with different .clasp.json files. Fortunately, things have just become significantly easier, as I recently built an app for this purpose called clasp-env, which is available on NPM. See the source link for details.
Convert selected range into PNG image and save it to Drive
In this post from Max Makhrov you can discover how you can convert a selected Google Sheets range to an image. With options to embed charts and tables in Google Docs and Slides you might be asking why you would want to do this. Max highlights a couple of great reasons:
You need to create a screenshot and use it later: send it to Telegram or email, or use it in Slides.
You want to create an image of cells as you see them on screen, containing images, charts, sparklines, etc.
You want to create a screenshot of a range that does not fit your screen.
You want to create a screenshot of a range with high resolution.
There are some limitations with this approach which are outlined in the post and if you have any solutions there is a link to contribute to the GitHub repo.
Updated the script for dependent lists, and now it supports new options. New for 2022:
Dependent drop-down lists can be used to create a dynamic list of choices in Google Sheets. When the user makes a selection from the first drop-down list, the choices in the second drop-down list will be updated based on the selection. This can be used to create a cascading list of choices.
If you are looking for a nice solution to build dependent drop-down lists in Google Sheets this is a great solution from Max Makhrov. For more experienced Google Apps Script developers the solution incorporates some clever snippets both from Max and a number of other members of the community. Some highlights include: converting a column index into corresponding column letter; a tasker to batch apply updates to a Google Sheet; ChuckyCache for objects above 100Kb; and a reference to a zip compression solution. All these are referenced in the source code provided in the post.
In this post, we’re going to see how we can very quickly format multiple Google Sheets with a little help from Apps Script.
The idea of this post, came from the Department of Education in Hawaii, where they have over 300 schools and a guy who works there told me he had to format over 300 Google Sheets the same way, and wondered how this could be done with Apps Script.
Easy I said! And I thought it was a typical example of how a little knowledge of Apps Script can help you speed up your work and allow you to spend less time doing boring, repetitive work, and focus more on the data itself.
Let’s see how it’s done!
This is a nice real world example of how Google Apps Script can be used to make a manual routine task more efficient. The post by Baz Roberts includes a detailed explanation of what is going on in the code making it also a great learning resource. If you have some more complicated Google Sheets formatting in mind you might want to also look at Google Sheets Macros, which lets you record every action you take within the spreadsheet creating a script you could call similar to the format functions included in the post.
Few days ago, with the launch of French region ‘europe-west9’ in GCP, I made an apps script to backup a Drive folder to Cloud Storage. It is a cool script and works nicely but after some exchange, we can make it better.
So here I come back with onleebackup an open source code to backup multiple Google Drive folders to cloud storage with synchronisation.
A very interesting open source project from Stéphane Giron which lets you backup Google Drive folders to Google Cloud Storage. An important caveat is with Google Apps Script limitations like script runtime and URL Fetch POST size this won’t work if you have gigabytes of data. The code has some nice features like handling Google Docs/Sheets/Slides file types, converting them to equivalent MS Office formats as well as management of Google Drive shortcuts, which requires calls to v3 of the Google Drive API. The source post provides details for setting up onleebackup, which also includes a link to a previous post with code highlights.
In this blog I am going to show you how to combine Google Apps Script with Google AppSheet to make automation even more powerful.
Whilst Google AppSheet is marketed as a ‘no-code’ development platform for coders there have been a number of ways to add some customisations to AppSheet apps. Previously webhooks were the main way you could do this, but the recent Apps Script connector for AppSheet makes it possible to call and if required pass parameters from AppSheet into custom Apps Script functions.
If this is something you would like to learn more about Aryan Irani has continued his AppSheet tutorial series on Medium with this post which goes through the step-by-step process for setting up and using Apps Script code in AppSheet. Click through the source link to find out more.
In this video you will learn how to access an API with Google Apps Script.
Chanel Greco has created this video tutorial which walks through some different ways you can interact with other sites with Google Apps Script to get data into Google Sheets. For the tutorial Chanel uses the Weather API and by coincidence Luxman Ravindrakumar has also shared a similar tutorial on Medium explaining how to use the OpenWeather API. So if you prefer learning by watching or reading you’ve no excuses :). Check the sources links below for both tutorials.
Recently, I got the chance of giving a training on Google AppSheet at O’Reilly Media, Inc. … This was a three hour long training where I talked about the basics of Google AppSheet and how to create apps on Google AppSheet.
Aryan Irani has shared a really helpful post with highlights from an O’Reilly Media hosted course he led focusing on ‘Developing Robust Applications with Google AppSheet’. The post links to a number of other tutorials Aryan has published on how to create various AppSheet based applications including an Expense Tracking App, Vehicle Inspection App, Inventory Management App and more. Aryan touches on how Google Apps Script can be used in combination with AppSheet. If this is a topic you are interested in Chanel Greco recently highlighted a Google I/O session on the topic.
Use Google AppsScript to automatically sync your reMarkable notes via Gmail to Notion.
Not the first example I’ve seen where the lack of API’s or other suitable integrations leads someone to using their inbox as an interface to move data around. This is a nice script example for moving handwritten notes made using reMarkable to project management and note-taking service, Notion. If you are not a Notion user it would be easy to send notes to another destination like Tasks, Sheets or a different external service like Coda.
+1, the webhook approach is nice because the Coda logic stays in Coda. I think it works best when the source (Apps Script in this case) just sends along data, not caring how it’s used.
