Learn how to list hidden Google Sheets tabs with Google Apps Script – CODE and VIDEO tutorial with script explainers.
This post from Scott Donald is an opportunity to learn about how you can work with hidden tabs in Google Sheets with Apps Script. For beginners this post is also an opportunity to learn about the JavaScript reduce method as a way to iterate through data. As well as the code and supporting video the author Scott Donald has some related projects where you can see this solution in action.
Working around the 100-widget limit in Card Services, used when building Workspace Add-ons.
Like it says on the tin a way to display more than 100 items in a Google Workspace Add-on. The solution also has a nice UX friendly search feature to make it easier to find stuff in the UI. The source post from Sourabh Choraria includes additional information and links to the code on GitHub.
Talking CRMs, Databases, and how to ditch them; this time within the Lead Generation domain. Bonus: pitfalls of a 90s computing mindset! 😅
Previously on Pulse we shared Rafael Romo Mulas’ post, Tech Recruiter Tries Coding. Rafael has recently published part 2 in which they highlight their journey into VS Code, clasp and TypeScript. If you are unfamiliar with TypeScript its a language which transpiles into JavaScript and basically designed to help you write better code. Rafael notes:
… the main difference is you are forced to be more precise, which avoids running into stupid errors! Therefore, to my surprise, it is actually easier to code in TypeScript than JavaScript, even more so for a beginner like me, because:
There is not much to “unlearn” from JS, if you just started anyway.
You’re alerted when values can be of a type that would cause errors.
You’re forced to do something about it, basically debugging in advance.
You can read more about Rafael’s journey in the linked article
Search a try/catch error message for keywords to determine the error message to log using JavaScript match.
Filter an error message in a try/catch
The following Google Apps Script is designed to exercise how you might go about searching the error message in a ‘try/catch’ for keywords. I wanted this specifically for a tool I built that contains a lot of code (and hence a lot of potential error messages) between a try/catch, for which a very small number of people were experiencing a timezone issue with their Google Sheet file.
The aim was to use a JavaScript ‘match’ to find the keyword timezone and display a set of instructions for the user to resolve the issue themselves instead of just a generic error message.
I’ve seen a couple of proof of concept solutions for AI generated Google Apps Script code, but this one is the most well developed I’ve seen to date. The AutoScript Add-on isn’t fully verified so if you are trying this out I would recommend using disposable credentials (as a Google Workspace admin I created/used a Cloud Identity account). I’ve only done limited testing but was able to get the add-on to generate a functional Google Apps Script code snippet. Simultaneously both amazing and scary to think a chunk of what I do for a living could be replaced by one of our robot friends.
Busy old couple of weeks at CTS and it’s been nice to get back to some face-to-face events. Last week I had the pleasure of joining the Google Workspace DevRel team on stage at the Google Workspace Developer Summit, London co-presenting with some guy called Charles Maxson.
A couple of years ago as part of Totally Unscripted we did a ‘State of Script‘ episode with then Apps Script PM Keith Einstein. This latest clip from the Google Workspace Developer YouTube channel captures not just the state of script, but the wider state of Workspace Dev.
The clip is worth a watch to get a summary of some of the new features coming to Workspace development. For me, not only is there plenty to get excited about my overall feeling from the Summit was Workspace development is now a first class citizen in the Google Cloud family. The state of Workspace development is good!
Apps Script added a new method to the Utilities class. parseDate(date, timeZone, format) parses a provided string date according to the specification described in the Java Standard Edition SimpleDateFormat class.
Given the popularity of handling data using Google Apps Script I’m sure many will welcome the inclusion of a parseDate() method which was included in the most recent release notes.
Have you ever wanted to convert currencies instantly while in Google Chat with colleagues and clients? In this tutorial, we are going to build a Currency Converter Google Chat App with Google Apps Script to do just that.
This tutorial is a multi-media series containing step-by-step video instructions for each stage of the process along with code snippets for each stage, important links and some further details on the more unusual parts of the code.
This is a great video series wrapped in a blog post, which highlights a Google Chat app development process. The particular project presented by Scott Donald is a currency converter but there are many repeatable aspects that would work in a wide range of Google Chat applications. The project is coded in Google Apps Script and the post includes plenty of snippets to help you understand various aspects of Google Chat app development including slash commands and information cards.
Bulk convert Google Sheets within a given Google Drive folder into PDFs and optionally delete the original file.
Bulk convert Google Sheets to PDFs using Apps Script
Features
Maximum runtime – in order to prevent the tool from reaching the limits imposed by Google you can adjust the number of minutes the tool can run for. Change this in the ‘GlobalVariables.gs’ file in the Script Editor.
Continue from where it left off – if you have a lot of Google Sheets to convert and the above runtime is reached the tool will save its progress and prompt you to run it again, avoiding any file duplication.
HTML popup – as well as the ‘Log’ sheet the tool displays a direct popup to the user if it encounters a problem.
PDF counter – after successfully running the tool will include the number of PDFs created as part of the success popup to the user.
This is a workaround for checking the existence of file ID in Google Drive without both the access token and API key.
When you want to check whether the file of the file ID is existing in Google Drive, generally, you might use Drive API and Drive service (DriveApp) of Google Apps Script. In this case, the scope of Drive API is required to be used. By this, the access token and the API key (in the case of publicly shared files) are required to be used. But, there might be a case that the available scopes are limited. In this post, I would like to introduce a workaround for checking the existence of file ID in Google Drive without both the access token and API key.
This workaround could have been a nice addition to a recent project I was working on to audit a bunch of Google Drive file IDs. As noted in this post a big benefit of the approach is there is no need to include Google Drive authentication scopes to your project. See the source post for the code and explanation.
