Collaborative Tools Project

We wanted to improve the way people at the University request new software and tools. This is a process that requires lots of people's feedback and needs to be very flexible. We need to get software experts to look at it, security teams, the support teams, teaching experts to see if is a good pedagogical match. We need the licensing to looked at and the usability and accessibility. The list is astonishingly long and in these cases it often gets so that your process map just starts to look like infinite spaghetti. No wonder it didn't quite work, infinite spaghetti is always troublesome. Much of my work involves trying to find a workable solution to a fiendish problem.. it's simplicity hunting. And when working with people around the university it's clear that they really don't want a tool that solves their immediate problem, they want abilities that solve problems like these. This is a very different thing. And besides I personally couldn't create So, out of ...

Someone recently asked for the ability to schedule send an email. It was for a link to a class feedback form and ideally they'd like to be able to send it near the end of the class. We looked at Boomerang, which had issues with authenticating with the York domain, and broke the CSS of Gmail slightly. We tried mx Hero, a Chrome app but after a tip off from a colleague and reading the reviews and discovering it at times didn't send the email, or used http rather than https etc we thought it might be better to look into making our own solution. Apps Script to the rescue! I wanted something that was really simple, and easily editable to do what you want. I made an Apps Script to check your Gmail Drafts folder. If there's a message whose subject begins with a date, like this, it sends it ... [27/06/2014] Hello, this is a message from the future! How to install it... 1. Go to the Apps Script here and choose the menu, File > Make a Copy . You will want to chang...

I thought I'd share this ongoing project I've been working on about creating workflow support for a team. I've referred to it before in a blog post called  Using Spreadsheets Instead of Forms , in which I argue how using the commenting, "live saving", versioning and collaborative features of spreadsheet far exceeds what can be done with a simple Google Form (see below). This is especially so when the data you are collecting is long and complicated. ( Tip of the hat to Tim Saunders who had this idea ). Having quickly trialled and liked bespoke workflow apps like Kissflow , and also read the documentation for bigger workflow systems like RunMyProcess , we realised that one of our first challenges was to define the mood or tone of this process. It was clear that the process we were trying to support was more consultative and discussion-based than a hard passing of numbers and approvals in a clear process flow. Our process needed to be more about " letti...

Yesterday was a difficult day with Google Apps. Almost everything I tried to create was stopped dead in its tracks. I am making some spreadsheets that support an approval workflow process and so far it had been going really well. I have a Google Form, that initiates the process. This keeps a list of the workflows. These are displayed in a web app. When the form is submitted, a copy is made of a master spreadsheet is made and the people fill in the data in that. At various points of completion, a controller person fires off scripts like "Initial Approval", "Approved by the Teaching Committee" and the relevant people are notified that they now need to "fill in their bits". So far so good. I began thinking that, at some points it would be really useful to assemble the relevant data, notes, reminders and links into a Gmail draft so that the controller person might check it over, add any extra message and then send it. But with Apps Script you can't...

I'm in some confusion about how Apps Script projects work when embedded in a Google Spreadsheet. In my current spreadsheet, when I choose "Script Editor", I see this... As you can see, there are multiple projects in the spreadsheet. I don't get this. It always happens that when I copy a spreadsheet too... that I end with a "Copy of XXX" and "XXX" Apps Script projects inside the spreadsheet.  I can add extra projects via the "Create a new project" link but I can't remove projects from spreadsheets. This gets more confusing if both "Copy of Web App n Stuff" and the "Term Week Dates Booking Project" have a doPost () function in them. Which function gets called?  Why would I want more than one Apps Script project in a spreadsheet? Why can't I flip a project out to be a standalone Apps Script project? When making copies of spreadsheets - why do I end up with multiple projects in a sprea...

This article looks at creating an application that converts a Google Document to HTML, saves it in a folder on your Google Drive and then shares that folder on the web. This tool is meant for those situations where you have to work in HTML but you'd prefer it if you could use Google's fantastic collaboration features on the content first. What This App Doesn't Do It doesn't try to be too clever. I quite like HTML from back in the 90s when it was simple. Most other systems where you can add HTML don't like you getting too fancy either. It doesn't try to size the images or even get ALL the document elements like Tables of Contents or Page Breaks, it just does the absolute basic needed to copy the source HTML into Blogger or into your CMS and you will need to do more than a little "fixing up" along the way. What is really useful about this app is that all the images are now hosted and so you don't need to go through the painstaking process of...

This article looks at using Apps Script to add new features to a Google Spreadsheet. At the University of York, various people have been using Google spreadsheets to collect together various project related information. We've found that when collecting lots of different collaborative information from lots of different people that a spreadsheet can work much better than a regular Google Form. Spreadsheets can be better than Forms for data collection because: The spreadsheet data saves as you are editing. If you want to fill in half the data and come back later, your data will still be there. The data in a spreadsheet is versioned, so you can see who added what and when and undo it if necessary The commenting features are brilliant - especially the "Resolve" button in comments. One feature we needed was to be able to "attach" Google Docs to certain cells in a spreadsheet. It's easy to just paste in a URL into a spreadsheet cell, but they can often...

I was contacted and asked if I could create a Google Form where the user can only check 8 out of 16 checkbox choices. Google Forms can't do this sort of restriction and so I whipped together a quick web application to do this. I created an Apps Script in Google Drive and then added this code below. function doGet(e) { var app = UiApp.createApplication().setTitle("Restricted Multiple Choice").setHeight(250).setWidth(500) // Define the grid layout var grid = app.createGrid(16, 3 ).setStyleAttribute(3, 2, "width", "420px").setCellPadding(5) grid.setStyleAttribute("margin-left", "auto") grid.setStyleAttribute("margin-right", "auto") grid.setStyleAttribute("margin-top", "100px") // Create the text at the top var html = '' html += "Restricted Multiple Choice" html += "You can only choose 3 of the items below." var html_widget = app.createHT...

At Theatre, Film & TV they have lots of equipment they loan to students, cameras, microphone, tripod etc. Keeping track of what goes out and what comes back is a difficult job. I have seen a few other departments struggling with the similar "equipment inventory" problems. A solution I have prototyped uses QR codes, a Google Spreadsheet and a small web application written in Apps Script. The idea is, that each piece of equipment ( or maybe collection of items ) has a QR code on it. Using a standard and free smartphone application to read QR codes, the technician swipes the item and is shown a screen that lets them either check the item out or return it. The QR app looks like this. The spreadsheet contains a list of cameras. It has links to images and uses Google Visualisation tools to generate its QR codes. The spreadsheet looks like this. The Web Application The web application, which only checks items in or out and should be used on a phone in conjunctio...

Google Forms are a great way to quickly collect data into a spreadsheet but what if the data you are collecting is a bit too complex for a simple form to handle? We've been experimenting with using a Google Spreadsheet, instead of a Form to gather information and finding that this approach has many advantages. We still use a Form to "initiate" the process, and the data gathered from the form is saved in a "central" spreadsheet. When the form is submitted, the central spreadsheet makes a copy of a "template" spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is more "human readable" than a regular spreadsheet. When the form is submitted, the data is saved as normal, but it also fills in certain values in the copied template sheet, sets the right permissions and mails all the people who need to know about it a link to edit the template copy. This template sheet has a "form-like" layout, including help ( shown at the right hand side ) and additional ...

Last week Google announced a number of new Apps Script features that have been added to Google Documents and Forms and Spreadsheets. The features themselves may not seem worth shouting that loudly about, but the ability to add Sidebars to documents and add menus and arbitrary user interface items that run Apps Script code means you can start to dream about how you could extend and combine these really powerful objects in new ways. Google Apps was already a collection of powerful objects ( Documents, Spreadsheets, Drive Files, Forms, Calendars, Sites ) that could be easily combined with Apps Script to create really useful applications, but with the arrival of these new features, the ability to combine them can be more elegant. And because you can create tools and interfaces within the documents you can extend the tools - rather than just combine them. We've already seen a demo of Bibsto , an Apps Script Bibliography manager that changes Google Documents into Research papers -...

For a long time I've been saying that Google need to make sure that their left hand knows what the right is doing. There are pockets of innovation in some products that are notably missing from other products. And whilst I don't advocate insisting that each department should consult with each other department before a beautiful carbuncle can be brought into the world, it's nice when you feel that different Google teams are at least on speaking terms. One example ( and there are dozens and dozens ) of innovation insularity is the features that are in a Google Spreadsheet. With a little code and ingenuity you can add menus, and pop ups and whole new interfaces to a spreadsheet, but this can't be done in a Google Document. "Why not?" you might ask. And rightly so. So, I was very pleased when Google announced at Google I/O ( their big developers conference happening right now ) that the features from Spreadsheets were being added to Google Documents. Take a lo...