Google Apps Scripts delivers scripts. Goodbye to the mundane, you're now free to automate.
In mid-August Google launched Google Apps Scripts to all its Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers. With these scripts, Google provides its user base yet another layer of customization within the Google Apps platform and for my inaugural blog post on Google Subnet, I want to walk you through how you can learn to use this scripting tool. In addition to providing users with the ability to create custom web forms and insert internet “lookup” functions, Google Apps users can now build custom scripts to automate tasks.
For instance, a user could turn a spreadsheet used as an online form collecting newsletter subscriptions into a mail merge document that will automatically email subscribers with a confirmation of their registration (see image below). Or, if your company tracks projects using Google Apps’ spreadsheets and you want to send emails to team members when their task status is updated, the process can be automated with Scripts.
Click to enlarge graphic.
So far, this all sounds pretty simple. However, I discovered through the Scripts tutorials that this stuff is fairly technical. Perhaps the term “Scripts” implies some level of technical agility as I found myself digging deep to summon my previous life’s JavaScript skills. Even though the provided tutorials do an excellent job of explaining the example scripts line by line, non-technical spreadsheet users might be left with more questions about automation than they started with.
Still, for those who know enough JavaScript to consider themselves dangerous, Scripts provides a new tool to scratch that technical itch and automate some of those more mundane tasks. Hopefully in the near future, Google will organize some of the more popular user created scripts for spreadsheet users into canned scripts, similar to what they’ve done with Google Docs templates. You can already see sprouts of community collaboration in the Google Apps Script Help Forum if you’re in need of further help.
My hunch is, the more one tinkers with these scripts, the more uses one will find. And before long, they’ll be contributing members of the Google Apps “automation nation”. Overall, I like what I see with Google Apps Scripts. They deliver further flexibility, promote an increasingly customized platform and provide users with enough control to automate and innovate. To learn more about Google Apps Scripts, visit https://www.google.com/google-d-s/scripts/scripts.html.
