Cloud scripting with Google Apps Script
Staying On Script
© Olga Yastremska, 123rf.com
Spreadsheet scripting with Google Apps Script is made possible by server-side JavaScript.
Most people are familiar with spreadsheets because most people use them for some purpose. Google, among others, brought spreadsheets to the browser with Google Docs, which took them up a notch in terms of utility, ubiquity, and sharing. With a new service called Google Apps Script (GS), you can do even more interesting and useful things with your spreadsheets.
In this article, I'll take a look at how you can take a "master" list, such as a list of company employees, and break it down into consumable sublists, such as a list of employees by office location. Next, I'll take that data and publish it to a series of web pages in Google Sites. Because access to data often is dependent on role or authority, I will also touch on permissioning. This same recipe could be useful in a thousand scenarios, such as providing football team rosters from a master list of all the players in the league.
Google Apps Script is basically JavaScript run on the server (see "Déjà Vu All Over Again"). Google provides a complete development environment in the browser and does all the code versioning and hosting for you. Google also provides a library of functionality, with APIs for other Google services, from email to documents to sites. For this tutorial, I'll assume you have a Google account and some familiarity with JavaScript. If you're a total beginner, see the GS tutorial [3].
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