Google Apps Script summarized my own practice what is strong and when to use | Tuesday, Mar 19 2024 8:31AM

Introduction

Since Google Apps Script can do various things for free, it tends to be a story like “let’s do everything with GAS”. Google Apps Script is also not a panacea, so we recommend that you understand its strengths and weaknesses and use them in comparison with other options.

Now that you have created 2–30 Google Apps Script projects, let’s put together our practices.

This content includes the content at the time of the presentation at Cloud Next ’18 in Tokyo. Since more than half a year has passed since this presentation, the update part is also summarized below.

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Strengths and weaknesses of Google Apps Script

First, let’s summarize our strengths and weaknesses.

Strength 1. Easy to call Google Apps API

I think this is my greatest strength. Google Apps Script makes it easy to call Google Apps APIs such as Spreadsheet, Gmail, and Calendar. Since you can call the API without writing any authentication code, you can create what you want with about 30 lines of code.

Strength 2. Can be closed and published to G Suite domain

You can create a web page with Google Apps Script, but there are cases where you want to close it and publish it internally, for example, by displaying a Spreadsheet such as a list of employees on the web. With Google Apps Script, it is possible to publish by closing the disclosure range to the G Suite domain, so you do not have to write the authentication process again, and you can create a secure system without any thought.

Strength 3. Free

I think it’s the main reason why “you can do anything with Google Apps Script”, but although Google Apps Script has limitations (described later), you can use it for free. You can easily create websites and APIs, so you want to publish anything with Google Apps Script.

Strength 4. Easy to deploy

Similar to other FaaS such as Google Cloud Functions, basically saving the function and deploying it is very easy to deploy. It is recommended that you can push locally developed ones like Git by using the clasp.

Weaknesses 1. Various restrictions due to allocation

There are limits such as the execution time per day and the number of calls to various Google Apps APIs. This quota (Quotas) seems to be in the process of being relaxed, but it should be implemented carefully.

Quotas for Google Services | Apps Script | Google Developers

Under the flexible quota system, such hard quota limits are removed.Scripts do not stop when they reach a quota limit…

developers.google.com