Google Sheets

Mail merge steps

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Last year I had a ‘mail merge using Gmail and Google Sheets’ contribution accepted on the G Suite Developers Solution Gallery. Just over 6 months on there has been lots of useful feedback and requests for solutions to some of the limitations of the original published script. In the meantime Google has also made the new V8 runtime for Google Apps Script generally available. Given this it seemed appropriate to revisit the original solution updating it for V8 as well as covering the most commonly asked for changes. In this post I’ll highlight some of the coding changes as well as some easy modifications.

Examples of hyperlinks in Google Sheets cells

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I’ll start off by saying this is a very geeky post and if you’ve landed here because you are struggling with extracting hyperlinks in Google Sheets then you might prefer to jump straight to Alexander Ivanov’s Extract URL’s Add-on or alternatively the Info Inspired post Extract URLs in Google Sheets Without Script. The problem: hyperlinks in Google Sheets can be in three different formats…

VLOOKUP in action

At the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) hosting large events is a regular activity and over the years we have developed bespoke workflows largely based in Google Sheets. In this post I’m going to share some of the tips we use for scheduling our events including drafting/publishing an event programme and how to keep in touch with your presenters.

Example JSON output

Currently one of the most popular posts on this site is my Google Apps Script Patterns: Writing rows of data to Google Sheets. Given Google’s recent announcement of the general availability of the new V8 runtime I thought it was worth revisiting this particular pattern and using the modern syntax now available to Google Apps Script developers.

Mail Merge

Simplify the process of producing visually rich mail merges using Gmail and combining it with data from Google Sheets. With this solution you can automatically populate an email template created as a Gmail draft with data from Google Sheets. Merged emails are sent from your Gmail account allowing you to respond to recipient replies.

Google Apps Script Patterns: Writing custom formulas/functions and handling single and range inputs

Custom functions have been in Google Apps Script since it’s public launch in 2009. These let you extend Google Sheets function list allowing you to create and share your own spreadsheet formula. The official Google Developer docs for Custom Functions are very comprehensive and in this post I just want to highlight one pattern for detecting and handling user inputs.