This is a Google Apps Script library including useful scripts for supporting to development of applications by Google Apps Script. In the current stage, the 3 categories “For array processing”, “For binary processing”, and “For string processing” are included in this library.
Google Apps Script developers often find themselves grappling with repetitive tasks particularly when handling Google Sheets data like array manipulation and A1 notation handling. Fortunately, this little versatile library from Kanshi Tanaike called UtlApp is here to help you simplify many of these common challenges.
Array Processing Made Easy
UtlApp includes a number of powerful array processing methods that can significantly streamline your code. Need to rearrange your data? The transpose method makes it effortless to flip your rows and columns. Want to extract specific data points? getSpecificColumns allows you to pinpoint and retrieve the exact columns you need. Dealing with large datasets? Quickly identify the first empty row or column using get1stEmptyRow and get1stEmptyColumn. And when it’s time to convert your array data into a more structured format, convArrayToObject can transform it into a JSON object, ready for further manipulation or integration.
Simplifying String Processing
UtlApp helps with common string processing tasks specifically for Google Sheets users. With columnLetterToIndex and columnIndexToLetter, you can convert between column letters and indices, making it simpler to work with spreadsheet data. UtlApp also offers convenient methods for managing A1Notations, such as consolidating scattered ranges using consolidateA1Notations or expanding them with expandA1Notations.
Handling Binary Data
UtlApp doesn’t stop at arrays and strings; it can also handle Blobs with the blobToDataUrl method. This function can convert Blob data into a convenient data URL format, making it suitable for embedding images or other binary content directly within HTML or CSS. This simplifies the process of working with Blobs in web-based Google Apps Script applications.
Effortless Integration
Adding UtlApp to your Google Apps Script project is a breeze! You have three convenient options: add the library directly using its project key, copy the individual script source files for array, binary, and string processing or copy individual functions into your project.
To find out more follow the source link to the GitHub repository.
This report proposes a novel learning method using Gemini to automate Q&A generation, addressing the challenges of manual Q&A creation. By integrating with Google tools, this approach aims to enhance learning efficiency, accessibility, and personalization while reducing costs.
The rapid advancement of technology has offered both opportunities and challenges to the education sector. While technology can be a valuable tool for supporting teaching and learning, concerns about its appropriate use have existed for a long time.
The education sector is witnessing an increase in AI tools, each promising to enhance teaching and learning. However, the quality of these tools varies significantly. Some are better designed and can – if used appropriately – can be beneficial, while others are poorly designed. This can make it challenging for educators to find the right solutions that meet their specific needs.
This blog post by Kanshi Tanaike sheds light on the inner workings of some commercial AI tools developed for educators. It demonstrates how these tools can use generative AI to create multiple-choice questions (MCQs) on a given topic. In this particular solution, Google Forms are used in the process, with questions and answers automatically generated by the Gemini API for the user to answer in a Google Form.
For educators who have experience with Google Apps Script, this project looks like a useful starting point to refine and create your own solution or simply used to gain insights into the functioning of similar commercial tools.
Great news for fans of both Google Docs and Markdown! Google Docs recently acquired the ability to export documents directly into the markdown format.
This functionality extends beyond the user interface, with early indications suggesting the Google Drive API might also be capable of converting between Google Docs and Markdown. I confirmed that this could also be achieved by Drive API. This opens exciting possibilities for automated workflows.
Google recently announced in July 2024 that import and export Markdown in Google Docs. This is a user facing features, which Google announced includes the ability to:
Convert Markdown to Docs content on paste
Copy Docs content as Markdown
Export a Doc as Markdown (from File > Download)
Import Markdown as a Doc (from File > Open or “Open with Google Docs” from Drive)
Kanshi Tanaike hasn’t wasted any time in unpicking Markdown conversion capabilities using the Google Drive API. This functionality enables automated workflows for converting between Google Docs and Markdown. There are various scenarios where this can be useful, in particular, given GenAI solutions like the Gemini API often generate markdown there are opportunities to automatically convert these to Google Docs.
As part of the source post there are sample scripts: one for converting Google Docs to Markdown and another for converting Markdown to Google Docs.
For the Markdown to Google Docs it is assumed that there is already a Markdown file in Google Drive. If you have a Markdown text as a string, for example from a Gemini API response, then you can create a formatted Google Doc using the following snippet designed to be used with v3 of the Google Drive Advanced Service:
function sample3() {
// note string is tab sensitive (tabs are converted to code blocks on certain Workspace accounts)
const sampleText = `sample text 1
| a1 | b1 | c1 |
| :---- | :---- | :---- |
| a2 | b2 | c2 |
sample text 2
* sample option1
* sample option2
* sample option3
sample text 3`;
const blob = Utilities.newBlob(sampleText, 'text/markdown');
const fileMetadata = {
name: `Sample MD Conversion`,
mimeType: MimeType.GOOGLE_DOCS,
};
Drive.Files.create(fileMetadata, blob, { supportsAllDrives: true });
}
An illustration which includes the Google Drive logo. The illustration includes a filing cabinet overflowing with files
This report provides a Google Apps Script to retrieve all files, including those within subfolders, for a designated folder. It addresses the challenges of retrieving files within deeply nested folder structures and obtaining complete file paths.
We’ve shared a couple of approaches to Google Drive reporting using Apps Script in Pulse, this latest comes from Kanshi Tanaike. There are actually two approaches covered in the post one using DriveApp and the other using the Drive API.
Hopefully, the related posts list on Pulse will highlight some of the alternative approaches you can use. I’m slightly obsessed with the .getFileNameWithPath() methods. This isn’t something that is provided in the Google Drive File resource data so it has to be constructed using only the file and parent information so it is interesting to see how this has been approached.
If you are looking at these code examples and struggling to understand them, Gemini (including implementations on gemini.google.com or aistudio.google.com), is a great way to copy the code (even the entire blog post) and start asking questions.
In February 2024, Google made a change in Google Sheets to enhance data security. Now, users must provide explicit consent before Sheets can connect to external data sources. This change aims to prevent unintentional data leaks and improve overall data loss prevention within Google Sheets.
Impact on Users:
When manually adding or editing certain IMPORT functions (IMPORTHTML, IMPORTXML, IMPORTFEED, IMPORTDATA) and the IMAGE function in a Google Sheet, a warning banner will appear blocking sending a receiving data until the user gives consent. To enable this functionality, users need to click “Allow access.”
Impact on Developers:
As highlighted in the first source post by Justin Poehnelt, this change caused issues for developers who programmatically create Google Sheets and automate tasks, such as generating PDF documents as the IMPORT and IMAGE functions were blocked.
Solutions for Developers:
Fortunately, Google introduced an update to the Google Sheets API to address this challenge. Developers can now enable external data access programmatically by setting the importFunctionsExternalUrlAccessAllowed property in the Google Sheet metadata. This allows specific IMPORT and IMAGE functions to work without manual user consent.
For the IMPORTRANGE function, a similar API property is currently unavailable. However, an unofficial workaround exists that involves calling an undocumented endpoint using Google Apps Script as detailed in the second source post by Kanshi Tanaike.
Future Expectations:
As Google continues to prioritize data security, there will likely be further enhancements to data loss prevention controls within Google Workspace. Hopefully, future updates will also include official API controls for IMPORTRANGE and other functions to facilitate legitimate data access for developers while maintaining data security.
Google Apps Script automates tasks (even offline) and builds web apps using spreadsheets as databases. This report presents a basic dining reservation system to illustrate key aspects of web app development with Apps Script, HTML, and Javascript.
One of my first Google Apps Script projects was an event booking system. It was a great way to learn about integrating with the various services like Google Calendar. Roll forward 14 years and it is a topic that Kanshi Tanaike has revisited with a dining reservation system built on Google Sheets with a web app frontend.
All the code is published on GitHub and even if you don’t need a reservation system a great opportunity to see how one can be coded and there could be lots of juicy little snippets that you can use in your own projects.
In this report, I would like to introduce the sample scripts for using Microsoft Docs files with Document service, Spreadsheet service, and Slides Service of Google Apps Script.
Users have had the ability to edit MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly in Google Drive for a number of years, Google making this the default behaviour in 2020. There aren’t currently any APIs or Apps Script services that enable you to edit these particular document types. This however hasn’t stopped Kanshi Tanaike for developing and sharing the MicrosoftDocsApp library which makes it possible to edit MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint files using the same methods as you would for Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.
The library is able to do this by converting the Microsoft files into the Google equivalent, before using the MS export options in Google Drive to replace the original files. This does create some limitations highlighted in the post. In particular, the original documents are overwritten and not directly edited which means any incompatible feature as part of the Microsoft to Google conversion will be lost. Regardless of these it’s a clever approach and might be useful for users who have to keep feet in both the Google and Microsoft worlds.
Gemini LLM, now a Vertex AI/Studio API, unlocks easy document summarization and image analysis via Google Apps Script. This report details an example script for automatically creating the description of the files on Google Drive and highlights seamless integration options with API keys.
In this blog post, Kanshi Tanaike shows how you can automatically create descriptions for files on Google Drive using the Gemini Pro API with Google Apps Script. The post includes a step-by-step guide on how to set up and use the Gemini Pro API by generating a key is Google AI Studio (formerly Maker Suite). There are geographic restrictions on Google AI Studio, but you can call Gemini Pro from a Google Cloud project with a little more setup (a previous post sharing Tutorial: Respond to incidents with Google Chat, Vertex AI, and Apps Script outlines a general approach for connecting Apps Script to Google Vertex AI services.)
The post includes a couple of examples showing how Gemini can be used to provide responses to both text and visual prompts. Gemini Pro is still in public preview and as Kanshi Tanaike highlights rate limiting will likely prevent putting these solutions into production just now. At this point hopefully there is enough to start experimenting with Google Workspace integrations to Gemini.
This is a sample script for copying the date object between Google Spreadsheets with the different time zones using Google Apps Script.
As I’ve previously mentioned working with dates, times and time zones can often be a bit of a headache. If you’d like to learn more about some of the challenges of dealing with ‘big balls of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff’ I recommend watching Comptuerphile’s Problem with Time & Timezones.
This post from Kanshi Tanaike highlights a couple of approaches for handling date/time objects in Google Apps Script when you are using Google Sheets.
Making the shared users input a value and upload a file without authorization of the scopes with a dialog on Google Spreadsheet.
It’s usually unavoidable when you are creating and sharing Apps Script projects that the user will be required to complete an authentication flow to approve access to the services you include in your script such as reading/writing to Google Sheets, Drive etc.
The process is reliant on OAuth scopes, which are identifiers that specify the level of access an application requests from a user’s Google Account data. They are essentially a way for developers to define the specific actions or data their application needs to access. When a user grants an application access to their Google Account, they are agreeing to allow the application to perform the actions or access the data specified by the scopes.
Sometimes you can restrict the ‘scope’, for example, usually for Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Forms where I need only permission for the current doc I will include the following documented comment to only require access to the doc that the script project is bound to:
/**
* @OnlyCurrentDoc
*/
There are some limitations when defining the scopes you need. For example if you would like a user to upload a document to Drive usually you would require the very broad https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive scope which will prompt the user to ‘view and manage all of your Drive files’.
Understandably users may become nervous approving such a scope and in some cases Google Workspace Admins may prevent authentication for this type of scope for unverified/unconfigured applications.
There are alternative approaches to allowing users to execute Apps Script projects without having to approve scopes like Google Drive. There are clearly security considerations when you do this, so always proceed with caution.
This post from Kanshi Tanaike has some examples of how users can be prompted to upload files to Google Drive without authorising Drive access. The post includes two approaches, the first using a Web App which is pre authenticated to run as the user who has deployed the Web App, the other using a service account. The source post contains all you need to know include the code.
