Preface

A couple of years ago, I was asked by a colleague to create a form to collect invitation responses for a show that our school was organizing. Like most computer users, I had some experience with spreadsheets and had used them from time to time to do some basic calculations, so I created a form with the results in a spreadsheet.

At this point, I simply wanted to count the responses and show the result somehow. As I didn't know how to get a clear view of these results and a simple addition of numbers was not very attractive to look at, I decided to take a quick peek at the documentation to see how to write a "macro" to eventually get things to look better.

Three days later, the spreadsheet had a custom menu. It had functions that showed me the results in colorful tables and sent me an e-mail when too many people had made a reservation for the same day.

I discovered that this "macro" that I was looking for had a lot more features than that; I had a whole bunch of tools and services that I was able to customize exactly to what I needed, without spending a single cent on it.

This was the end of my ''peaceful life without Google Apps Script'' and the beginning of a real adventure. I didn't know a single word of JavaScript or HTML. My only programming experience was using BASIC on an 8-bit microcomputer from the 1980s, so I knew that there would be a few things to learn.

This happened in 2009. At the time, Google Apps Script was just beginning its development. As it has grown a lot since then, it has provided an opportunity for my skills to improve as well. At that time, I found help from a couple of guys on the Google group help forum (now closed and wiped out). Thanks Henrique, scampmichael, and velosprinter—they know who they are.

I know that each of us has a different background and follows a different path but, nevertheless, I decided to present this book following the same progression that I had followed—from basic spreadsheet enhancement and customization to standalone web apps with really powerful features. In between, we shall see that other documents can have embedded scripts and that most of the Google services can communicate with Google Apps Script.

There is probably no way to present every possible combination of scripts and methods that are available exhaustively in a single book. But, I'll try to pick up the most useful and interesting ones based on what I see every day on the well-known help site where I participate a lot: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-apps-script.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Enhancing Spreadsheets, is an introduction to JavaScript as a spreadsheet macro language. It shows you how many aspects of a spreadsheet document could be modified using Google Script—not only layout and formatting but sharing and publishing as well.

Chapter 2, Create and Manipulate Forms, deals with an automated form creation and modification with Google Apps Script. It demonstrates the ability of forms to respond to triggers, thereby automatically sending an evaluation with reference to good and bad answers.

Chapter 3, Managing an E-mail Account, shows you how to send messages, filter your messages, and combine Gmail with documents to create your own workflow. You will learn that Google service offers an impressive panel of methods that allows for almost any possible manipulation of your mailbox content.

Chapter 4, Embedding Scripts in Text Documents, shows you how to build and analyze Google documents using JavaScript. You will also see how to build or change a document's content and how to analyze what is already present in the document.

Chapter 5, Embedding Scripts in Google Sites, demonstrates how a script updates your Google site automatically. This chapter also demonstrates the multiple aspects and advantages of the communication and combination of multiple services.

Chapter 6, Standalone Web Applications / User Interfaces, teaches you how to create web applications that work everywhere and that anyone can use. It also shows you how to protect your private data across the Internet.

Chapter 7, Using User Interfaces in Spreadsheets and Documents, empowers you to use your new skills to create more user-friendly documents and worksheets. It will simplify your work with spreadsheets and documents to either show data in a way that is not directly available or to add extra functionalities.

Chapter 8, How to Expand Your Knowledge, gives you tips and tricks to learn what this book could not cover. It will give you an overview of the many resources available to help improve your learning experience.

Chapter 9, Conclusion, ends with perspectives, secrets, and the author's personal point of view.

What you need for this book

You need only an Internet connection and a modern browser, although any browser should work without restriction. As most of the code is executed on a distant server, some rendering may differ if you use an old version of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

I would recommend you to use Google Chrome as it will automatically offer you one of the best compatibility performances and updates.

Besides that, you won't have to install anything.

Who this book is for

Do you like the idea of having some tasks executed automatically for you and want to get things done more simply? That's exactly the purpose of this book.

You won't need any preliminary knowledge to start reading, but be prepared to learn a lot of things in a short time. Being comfortable with basic text writing and manipulation such as copy and paste are mandatory requests.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user inputs, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "As you can notice, we use #name# to mark the placeholders."

A block of code is set as follows:

var docCopy = DriveApp.getFileById(sharedDocID).makeCopy('menu['+headers[todayInSheet]+']');
  menuFolder.addFile(docCopy);
  DriveApp.getRootFolder().removeFile(docCopy);

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

function myAgeInHours(){
  var myBirthDate = new Date('1958/02/19 02:00:00').getTime();
  myBirthDate = parseInt(myBirthDate/3600000, 10);

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Open the script editor from the Tools menu and write the code snippet we just prepared.".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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