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A friend who works at the Dallas Animal Shelter (a non-profit) asked me to help automate their process of generating reports from data gathered via Google Forms
by georgeaf99 10y ago
A friend who works at the Dallas Animal Shelter (a non-profit) asked me to help automate their process of generating reports from data gathered via Google Forms, which they were doing by hand every month... As a developer who is used to high technical investment into complex systems, I had to take a completely different approach to storing their information.
Google Forms + Spreadsheet + Python works perfectly for use cases like this: it is free, scaling isn't a concern, users can view and modify data at any time, and users can create Google Forms at any time. If you are trying to help a non-profit and aren't planning on maintaining their systems long-term, this is a great approach.
Code for the project: https://github.com/georgeaf99/das-care-contact-forms https://github.com/georgeaf99/das-care-contact-forms
- neeljpatel 10y agoNeed to dump a SQL query into a spreadsheet? That's what I made the script below for. Runs now on a cron job and now I have a makeshift analytics platform :) http://pastebin.com/ACwqc5um http://pastebin.com/ACwqc5um
- fragmede 10y agoReally curious in the "low" technical investment answer: where/how does the Python end of this system get run?
- jotux 10y ago>which they were doing by hand every month I would assume they just installed python on whatever machine they were originally using to hand-generate reports and the job of that person now is to just run the python script and wait for it to finish.
- tyingq 10y agoGoogle's AppEngine would likely be free or extremely low cost in this situation. Gspread appears to work there fine: https://github.com/burnash/gspread/issues/39 https://github.com/burnash/gspread/issues/39