Google Apps Script

The best kept secret for saving time and improving results in AdWords may very well be AdWords Scripts, a lightweight automation tool that is easier to use than the API but more powerful than the standard interface and the AdWords Editor.

You remember important message in Gmail by adding a star but, with time, that list of starred messages may have become too big. Get a reminder to follow-up.

A powerful library for Google Apps Script to easily work with data stored in spreadsheets and databases

"On Saturday March 16, 2013, K-12 teachers will join forces with teams of computer science students from the NY/NJ area to (compete for glory and prizes and) develop free, lightweight tools for education in Google’s powerful javascript-based automation language - Apps Script. Come hack with us."

Bjorn Behrendt recently shared gClassFolders which automatically creates folders for your students in Google Docs. In the comments of this Google+ post you'll see Andrew Stillman has forked the code to include Romain Vialard's DriveApp library to handle ownership transfer. 

[Great to see the Apps Community sharing and building like this]

Once, instead of manually naming hundreds of towns in a (fictitious) foreign country, I weaseled my way out of creativity by writing a ridiculous set of custom spreadsheet functions.

A common tool in project management circles is the Gantt chart: a schedule of the tasks in the project and how they relate to each other over time.

With just a couple days’ effort in Google Apps Script, we created a complete application for crowd-sourced localization.

Nice example highlighted by Tom Smith at the University of York of how someone with basic skills can dramatically improve workflow with a bit of Google Sheets and Apps Script

"I got tired of the sites viewer in Google Apps, so I built one for our school district and for public use as a web service. Just type in your Domain and GO"

"Two important aspects about managing multiple projects with multiple teams are scheduling of the projects & milestones and allocation of resources to these projects. Over the past few years we have been using a simple Google Spreadsheet based utility which we had developed in-house to schedule projects and to allocate resources for projects. We had earlier released this as Free Software under a GPL license and made this available as free template and over 1000 users are currently using this tool.

 

The utility is available as a free Google Spreadsheet Template"

Jellybend.com provides Google Apps Scripts help and support to automate tasks across Google products and third party services.

Very useful demonstration of how course data exposed to a API can be pulled into a Google Sheet allowing further manipulation/exploration by using Apps Script to create some custom helper functions.  

Looking for a way to keep my Looking for a way to keep my Twitter Archive fresh I stumbled on this method for reading/writting/hosting files on Google Drive using Google Apps Script

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You might not know but Google are dropping the Appointment Slots feature from Google Calendar. The academic community has been pretty miffed about this decision because it's one of the features they've really taken to their hearts and were actively using. Appointment Slots are a great way of making any number of tutorial slots available for tutorials and letting students pick which times suit them. Google responded to the academic outcry with a list of alternatives. This list included paid for services with no clear pricing model for enterprise, downloadable open source software and, rather desperately, a few web2.0 tools that weren't even relevant. Few of these tools integrated with Google Calendars or Contacts, none would have worked with our log ins, and of course, none would be embedded in your Google Calendar making it easy to create overlapping or clashing appointments. So, I wondered how useful a tool I could create using Apps Script. Of course I couldn't embed it Google Calendar but it could work with our York single sign-on, and add details to Google Calendar. The Apps Script environment is limited in many ways - making it difficult to create an elegant solution, but its integration abilities might make it "good enough" for booking tutorial slots."

"awarding Mozilla Open Badges through a complete badge environment that handles questions, marking, badge assertion, persona authentication and Mozilla backpack awards. I introduced this in a previous post, but now that I've added the last stage of Persona and Mozilla integration, you can actually move these badges into your openbadges backpack"