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I have used this fairly extensively in helping a large volunteer organization manage a staggering array of Google forms, docs, and so forth. As another comment
by ims 13y ago
I have used this fairly extensively in helping a large volunteer organization manage a staggering array of Google forms, docs, and so forth.
As another commenter said, it is like VBA except you get to use JS which is nicer. You can do quite a bit with these scripts. More than you might think. But... It has serious drawbacks.
1. The script implementation has been changing often and without warning.
2. It fails unpredictably with no indication of what the problem is (the built in log is limited and it is difficult to tell where the source of trouble is -- Google Docs? the spreadsheet you're working on? a bug in the code?)
3. Undocumented bugs are rampant. Real example: you add a small script in the responses spreadsheet to send e-mail confirmation to people who submit a Google form. It uses the built-in onFormSubmit trigger. By all appearances, this will start to e-mail everyone going forward. Instead it e-mails everybody who has ever submitted since the form went live.
4. Sometimes runs incredibly slowly with no apparent reason.
Like everything else in Google Docs, there are lots of things you just can't do -- some by design, some not.
- lhl 13y agoI'd definitely have to agree with the caveats having used App Script a fair bit w/ various Google Spreadsheets. The documentation is thin and you'll find lots of long-standing issues only through digging through various support/group threads, the debugging is obtuse and unsuitable for triggered actions - there's no logging. The killer though is that the performance/rate limiting is crap - as your document gets bigger, your functions will fail and time-out semi-randomly, even if you're not making a significant # of API calls. Presumably this is because of the way that GDocs are XML streams internally - but even doing single getsheets in calls (no cell iterating) seems to cause problems. I couldn't find good caching/global storage mechanisms in the past - but hadn't seen ScriptDB before, so maybe that can help (storing in scratch sheets doesn't help since you need to use the API calls to get that stuff) Anyway just some of my experiences for those who are interested in working w/ App Script for Google Spreadsheets. It's been years since I touched any Excel Macros, but they worked a lot better than my experience w/ App Script.