Collaborative Tools Project

I met with a department recently and they'd made a spreadsheet where they could tell each other when their preferred time to have a weekly meeting would be. When you have lots of people working different hours as they do, it's difficult to choose a single time that doesn't always exclude someone. They created a sheet for everyone that looks like this.... You can see how complex things can be schedule-wise for just one person. The problem was that when they tried to calculate when the best time to meet would be, they got this... ...and discovered that there's never a good time to have a Team Meeting - except for Friday breakfast and over lunch on Tuesday. I think the problem may have been our inability to imagine how to go about solving the problem, mine especially. Using lots of embedded arcane formulas in spreadsheets has always worried me. I imagine this is simple for a spreadsheet expert.  What we needed to was work out all the available ti...

Each year, around 200 chemistry students perform 20 Lab Experiments ( that’s roughly 4,000 a year ). Each test has a variety of marks to be kept by at least three people, the lab technician ( did they attend?), the tutor ( did they create the right chemistry and hand in their notes?) and the course leader ( are there any exceptions or mitigating circumstances etc). What was previously a paper-based method had recently been made to work in our VLE, but the data captured was in a cumbersome wiki text format. And whilst the user interface was simple enough, the technology was struggling and getting the data collected from the VLE into our marks database required considerable human effort. Working with David Pugh in Chemistry, we looked at using a Google Spreadsheets to collect the experiment data instead. After a few prototypes we have decided to use a very simple ( but quite wide ) spreadsheet to store the data and a web application “front end” for the markers to enter their marks.  ...

The original idea was to use a calendar for hot desk ( or perches as they're called ) bookings, that students could add their bookings to. The idea was to use a spreadsheet, to essentially show which hot desks ( or perches ) which were already booked. The idea was for the script to add an event to the booking calendar, and add the student to the event as a guest. All of these lovely ideas would mean that there was one central calendar that admin people could check, that people could add their own bookings and also receive something in their calendar so they wouldn't to forget to show up. Except, none of this works... ... or rather, because I was cornered into creating a Booking Task Queue sheet because adding events didn't work reliably I therefore ran the event adding code from a Trigger ( once a minute ) rather than as  it happens. This of course means that the script runs as ME ... the script author and not THE STUDENT ... who is using the booking system. ...

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the Collaborative Tools Project this week. Someone had dropped in for a chat and I was enthusing about the creative possibilities offered by both Google App Engine and Google App Script for people "doing it for themselves" and they asked... "But does anyone actually want to DO this?" He had a point. To be honest, I don't know. I can't know, but I'm pretty sure I think I know that they do. And then within the week I came across someone at the University using Android tablets for data entry into spreadsheets, where data get moved between sheets based on a workflow and is all presented using lovely looking visualisations. People not only wanted to be doing this stuff - they were already doing it. Google AppScript So. I said I'd let you know how I was getting on with Google AppScript ( long video here if you want to get started  yourself ). The short answer is quite well. Given that I have a deep se...