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SPEAKER: So many vital operations
are served by spreadsheets in our day,
whether it's for planning, tracking, calculating,
data mining, or sharing.
It's also natural for them to grow quickly within our teams.
Welcome to the "Sheets to App Show,"
where we talk about how to tame these tabular beasts
into productive applications.
So my question to you, G Suiters is, have you
heard of App Maker?
Because it's a tool that empowers
a wide range of individuals in an organization
to turn important processes that live
in spreadsheets, for example, into a full-blown database
application using a drag and drop interface.
If you haven't, I will walk you through some of the problems
you can solve with it.
For starters, App Maker is currently
part of Google's office productivity bundle called
G Suite within the business, enterprise, and education SKUs
at this time.
It was originally created internally at Google
to accommodate for the overwhelming demand for custom
applications.
And it is currently paired with a Google Cloud SQL database.
This streamlines the creation of database web apps
and offers automatic backups of the data, greater processing
speed than a spreadsheet, and automatically
scales user traffic.
It also allows users to create, read, update, and delete data.
There are two common users that gravitate to App Maker.
The first group are folks that have
a background in spreadsheet functions and formulas,
and are typically, but not limited to, people
in roles in program management, asset tracking, finance,
human resources, or support.
A second group are developers or technical teams
that have familiarity with web app languages such as HTML,
CSS, and JavaScript.
Apps that are a good fit for App Maker
are spreadsheets that are frequently used.
And the schema of those spreadsheets
can be imported with a few clicks,
creating what is known as a data model.
A user interface can then be created
by dragging and dropping a form widget, for example,
into this gray canvas called the Data Model Editor.
And to display the data entered, you
can then create another page within the app
and drag a table widget that is automatically
bound to the data entered into that form.
And based on the comfort levels of the application author,
they can add further custom automation
such as displaying results based on the user's role,
emailing those who were assigned a task or completed one,
or auto-generating reports with fresh charts every week.
One can also leverage advanced features,
such as building relationships between tables,
using custom CSS for UI modification,
creating calculated fields via SQL queries,
and constructing event-driven workflows via client and server
side scripts or in an App Script, which
is similar to JavaScript.
Also note apps best suited for App Maker
fall within the categories of being relatively
small and simple, like apps that have less than 15 to 30 pages
or do not require a lot of custom back end integrations.
If you do wish to build a larger or more complex app,
we recommend using products from Google's Cloud Platform.
You can, however, still use App Maker
to prototype smaller, feature-specific apps
while they're built into a larger GCP app.
A key differentiator for App Maker
is that it is designed with administrative security
controls at the G Suite domain level, such as granting access
to App Maker authors based on what
organizational unit and author is assigned within the G Suite
admin panel.
It also allows for an App Maker author to collaborate
during its creation, or when support
is needed after it goes live, since it has the same sharing
permissions as a Google Doc.
And authors can also implement page level permissions.
And from a reporting standpoint, we
recommend using one of these four tools to measure impact.
First, G Suite admins have the ability
to see what apps have been built within the domain and by whom
in their G Suite admin panel.
Second, authors can measure their apps usage
by pasting a Google Analytics ID into the app.
Third, authors can create charts within the app using a chart
widget to display summaries of data
entered by users such as these.
And finally, App Maker authors can consolidate both app usage
and data summaries into a dynamic dashboard that's
free to use called Data Studio, since it
has built-in connectors.
If someone else in your domain would like to use your app,
but make modifications based on their use case,
you can share a template of it by clicking the Export button
and then choosing to select the entire app or only
specific features.
For example, if I created a custom widget
in my app that collects signatures electronically,
and I would like to only share that particular piece
of functionality, I can do so by checking
the box of that specific feature, which
is called a module.
What's nice, too, is you can optionally
choose to include the apps data or just its interface
without any data.
These exports are saved as zip files
and can be saved in Google Drive to manage access or be embedded
as links on a Google site, which is
a website that also uses the same sharing
controls as a Google Doc.
The experience for a user on the receiving side
is to download the zip file and simply
click Import from within App Maker and choose that file.
Even though these tools are most friendly when
used in combination with Google Spreadsheets and cloud SQL,
folks with a developer background
can choose to integrate their external databases
or with other Google APIs, as well
as any REST-based services such as Salesforce or Service Now.
Hopefully this summary gave you a better idea
of what you can use App Maker for.
If you found this episode helpful,
please like and subscribe.
Cheers.
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