Google Apps Script, 2nd Edition

Preface

If you are reading this book, there is a good chance you have heard of Google and its powerful office productivity suite, Google Apps. Google offers search, email, word processing, and hundreds of other cloud applications and services that are available to individuals but can scale all the way up to serve massive corporations and governments. As one of Google’s most popular services, Google Apps offers some of the best online office products available; they’re an excellent example of web-based applications that outperform legacy desktop software.

This book is about Google Apps Script, which is a service that runs from Google Apps, like Sites and Documents. Google Apps Script is extremely powerful when automating many of the tasks required by day-to-day spreadsheet operations, but it also scales up to provide a complete application platform. If you are coming from a Microsoft Office environment, you can think of it as the macros for Google Docs, but unlike simple macros in MS Office, Google Apps Script has a mature online editor with all the features one would expect in a development platform. Unleash Google Script’s user interface capability and you can create entire data-driven websites and applications that run across most modern browsers, including mobile ones.

In addition to the integrated development environment (IDE), Google Apps Script comes with a manager for organizing scripts, built-in debugging, automatic code completion, timed event triggers, and automated ...