Create your first Google Apps Script

Creating your first script might seem a little daunting, so if you're nervous you may want to check out the tutorial over at the Google Developers pages. Luckily you can opt to have some code given to you to start off with, so let's have a go.

I need to stop adding pictures of menus.

To open the Script editor just click on the tools menu and select Script Editor. The code that you write will be associated with the file that you're working on.

You'll see a dialogue box asking your what sort of script you're going to be writing. If you select the spreadsheet option you'll start with the following pre-populated code. Let's have a look at what the first function means.

The default Code from the "Spreadsheet" option contains two functions.

It's much easier to read text rather than pictures of text so from now on I'll be using embedded Gists from GitHub rather than screenshots. This makes it much easier for your to copy and paste snippets in to your own project - which, after all,  is what this site is all about.

In order to interact with out spreadsheet, the first hurdle is to work out how to tell GAS which cells we want to work with. The first 4 lines of the readRows function explain where to look for the data we want to use. Firstly we define the active sheet (the one associated with the script) and then we define a range which contains all the data on that sheet. Next we count how many rows there in that range - which can very useful if you need to perform an operation on the data received from each form submission. Finally, all the values in the range are stored in a two dimensional array.

The second part of the function is a simple JavaScript loop which logs the values in each row. The Logs which it generates can be viewed in View > Logs. This may not be terribly exciting yet - but we're making progress.