Hello World

Welcome!

...welcome to my new little blog. If you've stumbled across this looking for something in particular then I hope that what you find will be of some use. Feel free to get in touch or leave a comment if something isn't clear or you have further questions - I can't promise that I'll know the answer but I'll try to help if I can.

What is this?

I started writing Visual Basic for Applications what seems like a very long time ago. relatively recently I realised that I needed to update my skill set as we seem to be headed for the clouds.

Thanks, Disney.

So, I set about teaching myself to achieve the same sort of things that I could with VBA and Excel with Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps Script. Of course, it wasn't long before I discovered I could do some new things too. 

How qualified are you to be dispensing this advice?

I'm really not qualified at all and I imagine that I'll make mistakes and hopefully improve as I go along. Let me know if you spot any glaring errors and I'll do my best to rectify them. Basically to help cement my learning, I'm going to try and document some of my helpful discoveries on this blog. I hope that you find some of it useful too. 

Can I use your code?

Yes,  absolutely! Please feel free to use any of the snippets you find here for any purpose you like. If you feel like this site has been helpful, I'd be grateful if you shared it or tweeted about it, any of that social stuff. I'm just starting out so if you want to help spread the word it would really help.

Where else can I get help?

Google Apps Script is well documented - this should be your first port of call for correct syntax for using Google services. With a background in Excel, I spent a long time reading about the Spreadsheet Services which you might find quite familiar.

Beyond the Google services, Google Apps Script (can we call it GAS from now on? OK, thank you!) is essentially JavaScript which is well documented all over the internet. If you need to brush up on the basics I would thoroughly recommend running through Codecademy's JavaScript Fundamentals Track which is a truly excellent resource. The Mozilla Developer Network also has some great resources, particularly if you are digging a bit deeper.