Book Image

Learning Google Apps Script

By : Ramalingam Ganapathy
Book Image

Learning Google Apps Script

By: Ramalingam Ganapathy

Overview of this book

Google Apps Script is a cloud-based scripting language based on JavaScript to customize and automate Google applications. Apps Script makes it easy to create and publish add-ons in an online store for Google Sheets, Docs, and Forms. It serves as one single platform to build, code, and ultimately share your App on the Web store. This book begins by covering the basics of the Google application platform and goes on to empower you to automate most of the Google applications. You will learn the concepts of creating a menu, sending mails, building interactive web pages, and implementing all these techniques to develop an interactive Web page as a form to submit sheets You will be guided through all these tasks with plenty of screenshots and code snippets that will ensure your success in customizing and automating various Google applications This guide is an invaluable tutorial for beginners who intend to develop the skills to automate and customize Google applications
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Google Apps Script
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Google Drive


Google Drive is a file storage application, which from now on we will just refer to as "Drive", where you can store and synchronize your files on Google's server. Let's look at some of the advantages of using Drive:

  • You can edit and share Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms with your friends or collaborators in real time.

  • You can even stop editing a document on one of your desktops and continue with your smartphone or tablet, and vice versa, no matter where you are and what device you are using. This is possible because your files are stored on Google's Cloud server.

  • Files created with Google Apps are stored in Drive with Google's native formats and extensions. For example, Google Docs (documents) files are .gdoc, Google Sheets (spreadsheets) are .gsheet, and so on.

  • In addition to Google's native files, you can also store or upload any other type of file from your desktop to Google Drive.

    Note

    If you would like to synchronize files on your computer or devices with Drive, then you can install special software called Google Drive Client Application. While this application is running on your computer or device, it synchronizes files stored locally with the same files in Drive.

You may be wondering, what is the purpose of synchronizing files? Sometimes you may need to, or someone may ask you to, parse a CSV file stored on a desktop using GAS to process the data and organize it into a Sheet. In this case, GAS won't execute on the desktop, but it can on the Google server. This way you can access your Drive files and parse data within your synchronized CSV file. You don't have to upload the CSV file manually every time to Drive.

The following screenshot shows the Drive folder view: