Sheets | Read Write Collect

RSVPed Interested in Attending Apps Script Blastoff!

A free, introductory course teaching Google Apps Script from scratch

I have long had an interest in Google Apps Scripts. However, I have really gotten past simply appropriating other people’s code, especially Martin Hawksey’s work.

I have read a number of posts:

Collins’ Beginner guide to APIs with Google Sheets & Google Apps Script
Alice Keeler’s First Step – You Can Code Google Apps Script
Jeff Everhart Add Custom Menus to Google Docs, Sheets & Forms

I look forward to this new offering. I always enjoy the way in which Collins’ breaks things down with his courses.

Bookmarked 18 best practices for working with data in Google Sheets – Ben Collins (Ben Collins)

This article describes 18 best practices for working with data in Google Sheets, including examples and screenshots to illustrate each concept in action.

Ben Collins provides a guide for working with data in Google Sheets. Some of the useful steps that stood out were documenting the steps you take, adding an index column for sorting and referencing, creating named ranges for your datasets and telling the story of one row to check the data. Another tip I picked up from Jay Atwood has been to import data, if moving from Excel to Sheets, rather than simply copying and pasting.

Replied to Three Ways to Keep Track of Students’ Blog Entries by Richard Byrne (freetech4teachers.com)

One of the questions that I often field during my workshop on blogging is, “how do you keep track of what students are writing?” The answer to that depends on a few things including how frequently your students are publishing and the platform through which your students are blogging.

This is one of the big challenges with student blogging. When I used Edublogs in the classroom, I would moderate everything, therefore I would know what is being posted that way. However, I have been wondering lately about the idea of creating a formula in Google Sheets using IMPORTFEED where each new entry to that feed is added to an archive list. Then you could add a simple checkbox to tick off if you have responded to the blog in any way and even condition the whole row to make this process a little more visual.

Messing around with “Checkbox grid” question in Forms. It adds multiple responses split by a “.”. Can I SPLIT a range or a QUERY?

I love the new checkboxes feature in Google Sheets, just wondering the timeline for coming to GSuite. Only seems available in me Gmail account.

Bookmarked Google Forms: Pre-Fill an Answer by Alice Keeler (Teacher Tech)

Notice in this peer evaluation Form below that the students would enter the names of their peers and the project title. This has a high probability of messy data. As a teacher, you will want to sort and filter the peer evaluation results by each student’s project. For this, you will want each students name and project title spelled exactly the same.

This is another great example of the power of the URL. I love the possibilities of this, especially when combined with Google Sheets to provide a means of managing variables. Keeler also provides templates to work from.

Watched

David Krevitt walks through creating a custom formula for conditional formatting. He is correct in saying that there are not many posts or reflections written about this. The formula that he uses (which can be found here) highlights a value found in a separate list in a separate tab:

=match($F12, indirect("'rangeTab'!$B$12:$B") ,0)

I have used the following formula to highlight a whole row based on the contents of one cell:

=$O1="Yes"

Krevitt now has me wondering what else I could do.