Collaborative Tools Project

Making Your Own Version of Appointment Slots In a previous post I showed an alternative version of Google Calendar's Appointment Slot's functionality created in Apps Script. You can see it in action here . Since making this app Google have, rather fantastically dropped their dropping of the Appointment Slots feature. This app may be useful to anyone wondering how to make an Apps Script Web App that loads jQuery and uses HTML templates. If you want to edit the code that runs it, you can get a copy of the script here: https://script.google.com/d/1Helzgu286Rh9QuHh4dbUq9SloMpb3USwygXSyXP9JcL6erToXpoVK_o5/edit Then you need to go to... File > Make a copy ... and then... File > Manage Versions ... and create a new version of the app. This is needed when you want to publish your web app. So next, then go to ... Publish > Deploy as web app You might want to restrict  Who has access to the the app  setting to just people from y...

You might not know but Google are dropping the Appointment Slots feature from Google Calendar. The academic community has been pretty miffed about this decision because it's one of the features they've really taken to their hearts and were actively using. Appointment Slots are a great way of making any number of tutorial slots available for tutorials and letting students pick which times suit them. Google responded to the academic outcry with a list of alternatives . This list included paid for services with no clear pricing model for enterprise, downloadable open source software and, rather desperately, a few web2.0 tools that weren't even relevant. Few of these tools integrated with Google Calendars or Contacts, none would have worked with our log ins, and of course, none would be embedded in your Google Calendar making it easy to create overlapping or clashing appointments. So, I wondered how useful a tool I could create using Apps Script. Of course I couldn...

In my previous post,  Building a Booking System With Google Apps , I tried to use Google's UI Builder to be a front-end to saving events into a Bookings Calendar for students to book hot desks in the Berrick Saul Treehouse. I wasn't totally happy with the results... still. Lately, I have tried a completely different, simpler approach ( with quite a   few groans about icky Google Docs issues along the way ) which has a sort of  spreadsheet visualisation of the bookings that have been made.  It looks and works like this. Rather than taking apart the code in fragments, the entire spreadsheet is available here . Go take a look, from the File menu choose Make A Copy .  If you create a Calendar and change the Calendar ID in the Script Editor you might be able to get it working for you. There are setup scripts to generate a "calendar-like" spreadsheet. The perches sheet has a list of columns that you might want to alter to suit your needs. The ...

Note: This is the 4th of 3 previous posts about hacking Google Apps to attempt to create a usable Booking System. First run this code from the Script Editor. It will make you a "Calendar Sheet" with X number of items as columns and Y dates as rows. function create_a_blank_calendar_sheet ( ) {   // Run this from the Script Editor to create a Calendar Sheet.       var ss = SpreadsheetApp. getActiveSpreadsheet ( ) ;   var sheet = ss. insertSheet ( "Calendar" ) ; //this'll fail if there is one already...     var result = Browser. inputBox ( "How many x items" , "e.g 10 or 25 etc" , Browser. Buttons . OK_CANCEL ) ;   if ( result == "cancel" ) {     //Browser.msgBox("CANCEL: " + result)         }     else {       //headers?      sheet. insertColumnsAfter ( 1 , result ) ;       for ( i = 2 ; i < result ; i ++ ) {     ...

Given the swingeing criteria in my first post , I decided to start by creating the simplest interface I could.  I began with a simple database of Perches in a spreadsheet and then in the Script Editor created a rough GUI with a couple of dropdown menus, and a couple of buttons that I would fill with data from the a mixture of a Perches calendar and this spreadsheet. I decided not to keep track of bookings in a separate spreadsheet, simply because this felt like it would just be a whole heap of work. I would just use a calendar to store bookings. The guest of each event would decide who's booking it was.  There are two areas of the interface, in the top bit, you can pick a date and book it ( it shows how many perches there are left ). In the bottom bit the dropdown menu is a list of dates you have booked and you can delete them. Like this... The green blob at the bottom is just where I splat debug stuff. The list of perches is kept in spreadshe...