Google Apps Script Hackathon

http://sites.google.com/site/appsscripthackathonmtv/

I was fortunate to have my colleague Jane Ostrander attend this event with me, at the Googleplex on Thu, 23 Sept, 2:00 pm until 8:00 pm.

Most people know about Google Docs by now, the online word processing and spreadsheet applications. Google Docs is competing with Microsoft Office for everyday office tasks, since it allows you to store all of your documents in the cloud and share access to them with others.

What is fairly new is the ability to write scripts to connect different documents and GMail and execute tasks automatically. The scripts must be written in JavaScript, and the event that triggers the running of the script can come from the Spreadsheet tool of Google Docs.

For example, once a user modifies a particular spreadsheet, your script could run automatically to update another spreadsheet or record something in a word processing document.

Alternatively, you can start the script running manually. In order to perform an electronic mail merge, you can program the script to take names and addresses from a spreadsheet and insert them into an email that will be sent to each person on your spreadsheet.

This was called a "hackathon" because we brought our laptops and worked on projects there, with members of the Apps Script development team walking around to help us. There were many participants who then came up and demoed their small projects in front of the group. That is also why it lasted 6 hours, because people were doing real work there.

Jane had the great idea of asking the Apps Script team to present a workshop to our Pacific Region Learning Summit in Hawaii in May. This way other instructors can learn how to use it for their work and to teach their students how to write scripts as a job skill.