Tuesday 27 July 2021

Search Google Drive for owned files

The following Google Apps Script is designed to search Google Drive for all of the files owned by an individual (as defined by their email address). It will collate this information onto a Google Sheet, including:

  • The filename,
  • The file ID,
  • A direct/clickable link to the file,
  • The type of file eg PDF, Google Sheet/Doc, etc,
  • The file creation date, 
  • The file last updated date.

Provide the owner and maximum script runtime for search Drive for files.
Provide the owner and maximum script runtime for search Drive for files.


Tuesday 20 July 2021

Display HTML modal dialogue popup

The following Google Apps Script is designed to display a dialogue box within a Google Sheet. Rather than using the typical Alert dialogue box however, this one does not suspend the server-side script whilst open. What this means is that the Apps Script code does not pause until the user has interacted with the popup in some way.

This is really useful for some of the systems I have produced because they can be running for several minutes at a time during which a user is unlikely to simply be sat watching them. So if they are off doing something else and the typical Alert dialogue pops up, it's possible the script will timeout and produce a bad error message.

With a HTML modal dialogue popup I can incorporate it into a try/catch and continue to display a user-friendly message whilst programming the code to terminate in a more controlled manner - regardless of how long the user takes to interact with it.

HTML modal dialogue box with a message
HTML modal dialogue box with a message

Tuesday 13 July 2021

Extract text from multiple Google Docs into a Sheet

The following Google Apps Script is designed to iterate through Google Docs in a given Google Drive folder and extract the paragraphs of text along with a link to each file into a Google Sheet. A new column will automatically be appended for each paragraph.

This tool was designed with the vision that you may wish to centrally collate some comments/feedback written by others in Docs, into one central location so you do not need to open each file in turn.

Provide a Google Folder ID to extract text from Docs
Provide a Google Folder ID to extract text from Docs

Tuesday 6 July 2021

Get last row when using tickboxes

The following Google Apps Script is a quick piece of code you can insert into your scripts when wanting to get the row number of the last piece of data in a Google Sheet column. The traditional method of 'getLastRow()' was unavailable to me at the time - solely because I was using tickboxes within another column of my Google Sheet.

The purpose of the tickboxes were to allow easy user-selection and applied to the whole column. As an un-ticked tickbox has a value of false this meant the traditional 'getLastRow()' method would get confused and return a very large number. So even though my data would stop on row 6 for instance, the tickboxes continue down the sheet.

The alternative was a Function that could be given a Column, from which it would iterate through the data within it looking for values/blanks and then return the last row number.

Get the last row number from a given column
Get the last row number from a given column