Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Apps Script Rewind
Sometimes you just want to sit uninterrupted at your keyboard, bashing out a clever Apps Script to automate your life and your work … but sometimes you want to see how Google experts approach the tough problems. Sometimes you want to draw on other Apps Scripters for inspiration or help.
That’s why the Apps Script team — and many other developer-focused teams at Google — record Google Developers Live episodes in which we highlight a specific topic and drill down to discuss it in detail.
We also hold regular livestreamed office hours via Google+ Hangouts, which we post on YouTube afterwards. In these office hours, we discuss recent releases and give in-depth tutorials on topics interesting to Apps Script users.
Now that the 2013’s GDLs and office hours are underway, let’s recap six topics we discussed in GDL segments over the last few months.
Apps Script services
Triggers are an incredibly powerful part of Apps Script that allow developers to run code non-interactively. In this video, I talk about ways to schedule code via the GUI as well as programmatically, and briefly touch on intermediate topics such as common patterns and pitfalls when working with triggers.
Charts are a great way to visualize data. In this next video, Kalyan Reddy starts with a few slides about Apps Script’s Charts Service, then works his way into code samples for an application that pulls data from the StackOverflow API in order to create an online dashboard that displays contributions from top developers. If you want to follow along, Kalyan’s code samples are available on Github.
Working with other Google APIs
BigQuery is a Google service that allows developers to analyze massive datasets very quickly in the cloud. In this video, Michael Manoochehri from the BigQuery team joins us to talk about how to use Apps Script to automatically export aggregate BigQuery data into Google Sheets to make it easier to share. This show dovetails nicely with Kalyan’s video about charts (above), in which you’ll learn how to quickly wire up visualizations for the exported data.
And what developer doesn’t love Google Analytics? Although Analytics has built-in mechanisms to export data from the UI, it also provides an API for automated data retrieval. Nick Mihailovski from the Google Analytics team joins us to talk about the reasons why people might want to do this, and to demonstrate a toolkit that makes it easy to work with Google Analytics data within Google Sheets.
Third-party APIs
Many Google Apps users are also Salesforce users. In this show, Arun Nagarajan explains how to integrate Google Apps with Salesforce via Apps Script, and shows off a few code samples that demonstrate moving data between Salesforce and Google Apps in either direction. Make sure to grab a copy of Arun’s code samples on Github.
Need to build a robodialer or otherwise automate voice calls? Twilio provides an API for doing just that. Arun and Eric Koleda take us through some of the cool possibilities for integrating Twilio’s API with Google Apps. We had a lot of fun setting up the studio for this one, and it’s one of the most fun to watch. Here’s the code on Github.
Of course, if you want to hear our tricks and tips as soon as possible, you’ll should watch Google Developers Live, well, live — so check out the calendar of upcoming episodes for Apps Script and Drive. If you have any ideas for further segments you’d like to see, leave a suggestion in the comments below! We’d love to hear your feedback.
Cheers!
 | Ikai Lan profile Ikai is a Developer Programs Engineer working on Google Apps Script but transitioning to the YouTube team. Ikai is an avid technologist, consuming volumes of material about new programming languages, frameworks or services, though more often than not youll find him advocating pragmatism over dogma in the solutions he proposes. In his free time, he enjoys the great outdoors, winning Chinese language karaoke contests and playing flag football. He resides in New York City, where he watches in anguish as his favorite sports teams from the San Francisco Bay Area implode season after season. |
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