Collaborative Tools Project

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...

Google want you to be you. They sort of insist. And they'd really prefer it if you, the real you had a Google+ profile. And when creating a new blog on Blogger they try and make you link it to a real person's Google+ profile. Except there's a problem. If you create blog posts with a regular Google identity when at the University of York ( or anywhere ) then if you leave, all the images from your blog posts disappear and the blog posts look as if they are written by "Unknown". Hardly ideal, in fact, pretty rubbish. I've written about this issue before. It's caused because Blogger is sort of "held in stasis"... it is not a good fit with Google's other tools and yet it is so popular it would be difficult for them to close it down. And given Google's track record with social tools, I imagine they've been working out how to close it down for a while now. The Problem A department wanted to avoid this strange behaviour of Blogger be...

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...

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...