Hello out there web friend.

This post should be a short one, and builds on a few previous posts that involve creating custom Google Docs. In those articles, I demonstrate how to use various methods of DocumentApp to create custom Google Docs using Google Apps Script. In most of those examples, I use a method called replaceText that exists on […]

VCU is in the beginning stages of an LMS transition, and the instructional designers in our department are doing pretty much all of their professional development courses in Canvas now. Since everything still isn’t integrated with Banner, there is still some backend admin work to add users to our professional development account. Today I was […]

In this post, I’ll walk you through how to auto fill Google Doc templates with data pulled from a Google Spreadsheet using Google Apps Script. This tutorial is a follow-up of sort to Auto Fill a Google Doc from Google Form Submissions, so if what you want to do involves a form, that would be […]

Sometimes when you are coding and you need to make calculations, we introduce values into our programs that are called ‘magic numbers.‘ Magic numbers make it harder for someone else reading your code to understand its meaning and intent. What Are Magic Numbers? Magic numbers are unique values, typically numerical, with unexplained meaning in your […]

Over the last couple of weeks, there has been some renewed interest in a project I started a few years back, our Online@VCU virtual assistant (aka chatbot), that is created using Amazon Lex, Lambda, and DynamoDB. We launched the chatbot with maybe 10-15 intents, mostly focused on prospective and current students, but as a part […]

I’ve had a few people ask me about variations to my write-up of how to auto-populate Google Docs from Google Forms submissions. One of the most recurring involves appending all responses to a single doc instead of creating a new one from a template. Does anyone have a better method than manually updating a Google […]

This should be a quick post, but I’m doing more of my Google Apps Script development in clasp using TypeScript now, which exposes some interesting ways of doing things that I’ll continue to document as time allows. As much as I appreciate the built-in script editor, the cognitive overload of even moderate software with a […]

Over the past several years, I’ve been prying more and more at the limits of the WordPress REST API as they apply to creating ‘headless’ sites and applications. Using the ‘headless’ methodology we can side-step server side rendering (SSR) in favor of JavaScript applications that request data as needed to re-render different views for the […]

I’m working on a project right now that allows people to send images to the Google Cloud Vision API for analysis using a Google Sheet and Google Apps Script. As part of that project, we talked about how we could incorporate emoji into the analysis in various ways to produce insights. Since this is also […]

In the second part of this series, we’re going to take a look at arrow functions, how they are used, and how they can be helpful in the context of Google Apps Script. In part one, we looked at ES6 template literals and how they can be used to create elegant and dynamic strings of […]