Just as Vincent van Gogh knocked out a few sunflower painting in his time my current muse is Google Apps Script. At the danger of boring you with yet more sunflowers here’s a recording of a webinar session I did with Dave Foord at A6 Training and Patrick Lander from Loughborough College.

This session came about after Dave directed me to a question Patrick had posted on the Google Docs forum asking how you can ‘automatically create new sheet for each user completing a form’. Rather than just give the answer I thought it would be better to step Dave and Patrick through the solution, giving them a better understanding of how Apps Script works and some basic principals which they might be able to build upon.

So below is a recording of the session, a copy of my slides are also here (we struggled a bit with audio but hopefully you get the gist). The slides include the final code but it is also available here. Also recommend you go to full screen to see what’s happening.

Introduction to Google App Script (and how to automatically create new sheet for each user completing a form)

During the session Dave asked what the maximum number of sheets you could have in one Google Spreadsheet – the answer is 200 (more info on Google Docs limits here). At the end Dave and Patrick were also interested in splitting the form entries to separate spreadsheets rather instead of just sheets. Creating new spreadsheets with Apps Script wasn’t something I’d done before so at the time there was some head scratching but since then came up with the following code: (originally came up with this, but the code below is better)

Last updated by Martin Hawksey at January 26, 2013.