What are the benefits of using Google Apps Script?

You’ve spent the past few years grappling with Excel or Google Sheets. You are now fluent in formulas, pivot tables, filters and sorting.

Finally, you’ve mastered the spreadsheet, and there is nowhere left to go in your data crunching journey.

Wrong! Are you extending and expanding your spreadsheets using custom code? If the answer is no then you might want to read on to see what you are missing out on.

You may be be wondering why you need code in a spreadsheet? Surely this whole spreadsheet is built out of code so can already do the best it can of its own accord?

Nope! Sadly, (but also fortunately) there is a whole world of data analysis and data processing untapped by your average office data monkey. Normally, spreadsheets are most effective when the datasets that are plumbed into them are clean and tidy, and all we have to do is make a few pivot tables, maybe add an additional column here and there to make our lives easier.

Sometimes you might find that the data you want to present in a spreadsheet is messy, illogical and poorly formatted. This is usually when you would start cleaning things up, maybe doing find and replace or sorting the sheet and adding a new column to describe a complex value in a simpler way.

All of this takes time, and often way too much time. Time that you could be spending promoting your business or improving a process.

So, what’s the alternative?

If you use Google Sheets for your data analysis, then you’re in luck because there is a whole host of potential in your spreadsheet that is waiting to be unlocked.

Google Apps script is your friend here, and can save you a ton of time and effort.

The best thing about using a Google Apps script within your spreadsheet, is that you can re-use helpful code snippets in other spreadsheets, and build a library of helpful spreadsheet minions to make your life easier.

You can do almost anything with Google Apps scripts, if you have a problem in your spreadsheet, 99.9% of the time there will be a solution that uses Google Apps script in some way.

Here are just a few of the ways that Google Apps script can improve your productivity:

• Remove unwanted characters at a click of a button
• Change capitalisations at the click of a button
• Connect to external datasets over the internet (yes at the click of a button)
• Notify you when form responses arrive
• Populate templates with data and email them

To create a Google Apps script you will need to access the Google Apps script environment via a Google platform such as Google Sheets or Google Docs. You access this via the ‘Script editor’ which is listed in the menu options.

You will need some coding experience to produce anything complex, but there are plenty of examples of simple scripts you can add and tweak.

Find out how to get started with Google Apps script.

If all of this sounds great, it’s really just the beginning of a new era of data collection, processing and dissemination.

From personal experience I can say that it’s totally changed the way I think about projects and data, before I would avoid dealing with ‘tricky’ datasets, but now I enjoy the challenge of solving a particular issue, and then the joy of reusing that solution over and over again. Each time you do this you’re saving more and more time, and the effort required to write that code seems more worthwhile and more of a no-brainer.

Is Google Apps Script free to use? Does Google Apps Script cost money?

Google Apps Script is completely free to use.

The only cost is your time to learn it!

How many scripts can you create in Google Apps Script?

As many as you want! There is no limit, and the development options are continually evolving.

So what are the benefits of using Apps Script in a nutshell? 

Google Apps Script saves time. It makes your spreadsheet life easier, it makes you spreadsheets more useful and more powerful.

Find out more about how we can help you make the leap to Google Apps Script here.