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Showing posts from October, 2014

One-To-Many Relationship in a Google Spreadsheet

It's often the case that you want and need to be creating a database to store your data, but Google Spreadsheets are just so handy aren't they? But Google Spreadsheets are very good at relational data. Here's an example where, you want to have one column for the name of your recipe and another for the ingredients ( comma separated ). How you use this script is you click on the cell you want to be relational and choose the Admin > Show Relationship Editor. This opens up a dialog window showing you all the options included so far. You then alter the ingredients and it saves a comma separated list into the spreadsheet. Here's the spreadsheet . Use File > Make a copy to see it work and rummage around in the code. If anyone can help make the UI prettier I'd be grateful, thanks.

Fame!

I love it when a plan comes together. Or when someone I've been working with really starts getting to grips with Google Apps.   Tom Grady shares what he's been doing with Apps Script . I think he might have the bug.

The Problem With Google

I'm too old to be fan of technology, but I quite like lots of it, and you can't argue that Google have definitely taken the lead on collaboration. At the core of all its products is the idea that what you are working on, you will want to involve other people, as collaborators, as commenters, as mentors or viewers. But Google's model of collaboration is all wrong. Or rather, we've adopted Google tools at the university and although they provide the best tools for collaboration, their model of collaboration is hurting us.  Google's model of collaboration best matches a small business and individual. This is reflected in how Google Drive works.  For example, in Google Drive, if you create a file, only you can delete it. That's great isn't it? Except because a file is yours, when you leave the university, unless your admins move ALL your files to someone else, they're gone.  Before leaving the university, you could individually make someone e

Creating a Documentation Process With Google Forms, Documents and Spreadsheets.

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