In this post we’re going to look at how we can get data from an Excel spreadsheet and import some of it into a Google Sheet. As an example, we’re going to upload an Excel which contains the current month’s royalty data from Amazon and add it to a central sheet which contains all the previous month’s royalties.
Similar to the post on converting a PDF document to text, this tutorial from Baz Roberts uses a similar approach of using the Google Drive API for file conversion, this time converting a MS Excel file into Google Sheets to make it possible to easily extract and update a master spreadsheet. The post includes a detailed explanation of the shared code.
This tutorial explains how you can parse and extract text elements from invoices, expense receipts and other PDF documents with the help of Apps Script.
We’ve previously featured a method for extracting text from a PDF from Scott Donald. This latest post from Amit Agarwal uses a similar technique of sending a PDF document to Google Drive API to convert to a text file and then using RegEx to extract the content you need. Given the number of PDF documents flying around between organisations both of these posts from Amit and Scott are worth being aware of for potential future projects.
In this article, I will show you how can you visualize google calendar events in the google maps using Google Calendar, Maps Javascript API, HTML, CSS and Google Apps Script.
This is an interesting project shared by Kevin Vaghasiya which uses Google Apps Script to create a web app to display a range of Google Calendar events on a map. On the backend the script is using the Maps Service and geocode(address) to get the co-ordinates of the event location. This could be an interesting project to modify to send yourself a daily email with a static map image of your appointments.
Learn about the different approaches that will help insert images in Google Sheets and understand the reason why you may prefer one approach over the other.
In this tutorial Amit Agarwal covers the various ways you can insert images into Google Sheets, including with Google Apps Script. As part of this you can learn about the CellImage and CellImageBuilder which are relatively new features for adding an image to a Google Sheets cell. There are some useful code snippets included in the tutorial that can be dropped into your own projects.
This is a sample script for retrieving the summary of Google Document using Google Apps Script. Recently, a blog of Auto-generated Summaries in Google Docs has been posted. I thought that this is very interesting function. I thought that when this function is released, checking each summary of a lot of Google Document will be much useful for simply confirming the document content. And also, I thought that when all summaries can be retrieved using a script, it will be also useful. In this post, I would like to introduce to retrieve the summary of Google Document using Google Apps Script.
There are a couple of pieces of interesting information highlighted by this post by Kanshi Tanaike that caught my eye . First, useful to have a reminder that Google announced automatically generated summaries in Docs in February 2022. This might be a premium feature for the paid Workspace accounts as like Kanshi I’m not seeing this yet in my own free Google Workspace domain. The bit that really caught my eye is Google Docs summaries are using the existing Google Drive description property, which means it is not currently available via DocumentApp or if using the Google Docs API as an Advanced Service Docs. I’m sure this will catch some people out and hopefully this post will point people in the right direction.
Convert array values from the doGet & doPost event parameters into 2D array when writing them onto a Google Sheet.
Sourabh Choraria has hit a rich patch of Google Apps Script exploration and following the post we shared recently on Google Sheets cell precedents in this latest post Sourabh looks at restructuring data into a cartesian product. The post contains some nice other ‘Easter Eggs’, in particular, worth checking out Sourabh’s latest Workspace Add-on, Webhooks for Sheets, and a snippet of code on GitHub used in the add-on for handling GET and POST requests.
Google Apps Script is a hosted JavaScript development environment that makes it easy for anyone to build custom business solutions across several Google products. Figuring out where to begin can be a hurdle for such an expansive tool, so we’ve recently released 10 new inspirational sample solutions to help you get started. These additions bolster the Apps Script documentation, which now hosts more than 30 sample solutions.
Here are a few use cases our newest sample solutions address:
Google recently announced latest figures around Google Workspace reach in 2021:
With 3B people globally using Google Workspace there is an opportunity to grow the Workspace developer community and to help users get started Google have recently published 10 new sample solutions. The samples cover a range of coding skills and even experts should take a look as there are some great examples that can help with developing add-ons, Google Chat apps and more.
This week, we launched the Apps Script connector for AppSheet, which now makes it possible to call Apps Script code functions from a no-code AppSheet app. This greatly extends the abilities of AppSheet apps by letting them access the power that Apps Script provides. For example, an AppSheet app can now use Apps Script to automate workflows with Google Workspace using the Workspace APIs for Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Admin SDK, and more – as well as other Google services like YouTube, Google Analytics, and BigQuery.
If you are already familiar with this new feature you may find it useful to read the full announcement as it contextualises this feature within the ‘no-code’ / low-code marketplace and the benefits of integration with Google Workplace, Workplace APIs and other opportunities through Google Apps Script.
You can read more about the script editor updates in this related Google Workspace Updates post, which provides more details of note is:
This launch ensures Apps Script users can utilize the legacy features in the new environment:
Script Properties: Allows you to store simple data in key-value pairs scoped to one script. Script properties are typically used to store developer configuration data. The new IDE has now integrated the interface to edit, delete and create up to 50 new script properties.
Add-on Testing: Allows add-on developers to test their add-ons before publishing them broadly.
Time Zone Setting: Allows you to update the time zone of the script and its executions.
Rhino Debugging: Adds the ability to debug Rhino subroutines on V8 debugger, without migrating to V8. If the code is not V8 compatible, users will get a warning message.
enumerate a range in google sheets using google apps script and use that to find precedents of cells that contain a formula.
Let’s start with the ubiquity of spreadsheets. I’ve long felt that spreadsheets were everywhere but until a post from Hjalmar Gislason I had never seen it in numbers and it made for interesting reading:
1.2 billion people use Microsoft Office (WindowsCentral, March 2016), odds are most of them have at least access to Microsoft Excel.
Excel is the number one skill mentioned in job ads, mentioned in approximately 1 in 3 job ads! (Indeed.com Job Trends, June 2017).
In 2010, RescueTime found that about 25% of computer users used Excel on a daily basis and that about 2% of all time spent on a computer anywhere was spent using Microsoft Excel.
As useful as spreadsheets are the underlying data structure can cause problems. This is covered in more detail in Patrick Burns’ Spreadsheet Addiction, which amongst other things highlights the ambiguity of value and formula:
Primarily the problem is that some cells have hidden meaning. When you see a number in a cell, you don’t know if that is a pure number or a number that is derived from a formula in the cell. While this distinction is usually immaterial, it can be critical.
The leading example is sorting. When rows are sorted, usually it is desired to sort the numbers as they are. However, it will be the formulas that are sorted. To humans the numbers are the primary thing, and the formulas are just something in the background. To the spreadsheet the formulas are primary, and the numbers are mere results.
This is a long winded way to highlight some work from Sourabh Choraria which is exploring how the relationship between formulas and cells can be extracted in Google Sheets. As part of this Sourabh is looking at how the getFormulasR1C1 method in SpreadsheetApp can be processed to find precedent cells. There are some very funky use of regex to parse formulas which is worth spending some time to digest.
