Google Apps Script: The authentic{ated} playground (3 things that make Apps Script rock) #DevFest

I was recently invited to London to talk at the GDG DevFest London. The idea for my talk was:

With a pre authenticated cloud-based ecosystem Google Apps Script makes it possible to integrate into other Google services with a couple of lines of code. This turns Google Drive into a rich playground for custom reporting using Google Sheets as a data interface. In this session there will be a quick Google Apps Script 101 highlighting some of it’s main features and affordances. This will be followed by a demonstration of how Google Apps Script makes it easy to combine Google Analytics with other data sources such as Twitter and do many more playful things.

As part of this I highlighted 3 features of Apps Script I find particularly powerful. These were:

  1. Custom UI – creating dialogs and interfaces integrated into Google Docs, Sheets and Forms.
  2. Triggers (in particular timed and POST/GET) – there are a number of different triggers you can use in Google Apps Script but the ones I lean on the most are timed triggers and open scripts to POST/GET requests. Timed triggers let you run scripts on intervals even when you are not at the keyboard. The particular power of publishing a script to handle POST/GET requests that I like is that the script can run as you of the person accessing the script. Build in features also let you restrict access so that the script can only be run by you, someone on your domain, anyone and anyone even anonymously.
  3. Integration – there is some overlap with the previous two but given the potential worthy of note.  In other platforms developers it’s sometimes necessary to do a lot to setup the platform and prepare it for other people to use. Apps Script comes already  integrated with a number of Google products which means in a couple of lines of code you can access other services. As a demonstration you can see below that with Apps Script in one of line of code you can get a persons unread email count … plus a bunch of other Gmail data.

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For what it’s worth slides embedded below:

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  • Google Apps Script: The authentic{ated} playgro...

    […] I was recently invited to London to talk at the GDG DevFest London. As part of the 'authenticated playground' I highlighted 3 core features of Google Apps Script  […]

  • Google Apps Script: The authentic{ated} playgro...

    […] “ I was recently invited to London to talk at the GDG DevFest London. As part of the 'authenticated playground' I highlighted 3 core features of Google Apps Script”  […]

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