ARUN NAGARAJAN: Hello, and welcome.
My name's Arun Nagarajan, and in this video tutorial, we're
going to talk about building your very first Script.
So this is a great tutorial that we have in our
developer's site.
You can find it very easily.
So if you go to developers.googl
e.com/apps-script, it's the very first 5-minute
Quickstart.
So very first script, and here it is.
And you should actually look through the tutorial a little
bit to get the sense for all the different requirements and
some of the background information you need.
The important things are having some familiarity with
JavaScript.
You don't have to be an expert in JavaScript.
And also, of course, you need to have a Google account of
some sort, a Gmail account, or if your work is on Google, you
can use that account as well.
And the goal is at the end of this, we'll have a functioning
script that does a couple of interesting things that you
could then take and extend it as you please or use it as a
starting ground to understand how Apps Script works, and you
can start from scratch from there on.
And yes, so this kind of introductory information about
what a Script is, I think a lot of it is worthwhile for
you to peruse through.
In this particular video, we'll just kind of roll right
ahead and start coding pretty quickly here.
And the very first thing you want to do is open up a tab
and go to script.google.com.
And you can do this in any modern browser.
I'm using a Chromebook here, and it could be Internet
Explorer 9, 10, or Safari, or Firefox as well.
The very first time you go to this URL you may be
prompted to log in.
You may even get a welcome screen.
Just make sure you find the Start Scripting button and go
right into it.
And here it is.
This is our Script Editor.
And for this particular tutorial, I'm just going to
copy and paste the code from the tutorial document itself.
So we'll go back to this tab, and you can see that the
screenshots kind of show you what the Script
Editor looks like.
And here's the function that we care for.
You can see that.
It's a very few set of lines here.
Even with spacing, I think we're talking about just about
two dozen lines of code with a lot of comments and spacing.
And you can see that the function itself is called
Create And Send Document.
So you can suspect what this is about to do.
So I'll go ahead and hit Save.
So the keyboard shortcut for that is Control-S, or you can
hit the little Save button as well.
And I'll call this my first script, save that.
And you notice that the dropdown here, populated with
the set of functions that we had here.
And the only function we have here, of course, is Create And
Send Document.
And that's it.
I think we're ready to run the script.
We'll talk about what's in the script itself in a little bit.
Let's see it in action first.
I'm going to hit this Run button.
Now, this is very important.
So when you run a script, you have to give it some
authorization.
And when you run it from the Script Editor itself, it has
to take the authorization of the script owner, the
developer here, which is yourself.
So you have to authorize it.
This does take a couple of clicks.
But it's important to ensure that we get the
security part right.
So the very first time you run it, it just
authorizes the script.
You have to run it once more in order for you to actually
get the script to do what you want it to do.
So I'm going to hit the Run button, which is the play
button that you're used to from other script environments
or coding environments.
And that's it.
In this particular script, we're
not showing an interface.
We're not actually displaying anything back.
We're just running behind the scenes.
So let's go take a look at my Gmail.
So you'll notice that I have a new email in my inbox.
The number one popped up there.
When I click into it, here's what it says.
It says "Hello for my first Google Apps Script," and it
sends me a link to a document.
I'll click into it, and I'll see that it is just a regular
Google document populated with some content.
And just to confirm, if I go to my drive, I see a document
populated there as well when I ran this.
So let's now go take a look at the script itself.
So you can see that just in the few lines of code, what we
were able to do is create a Google document, add some
contents to it, get its link, and then send it as an email
to a person that I want to send an email to.
I think in this case it's sending it to myself.
So very succinct set of code here to get you started.
Create a document, append some content in a paragraph, close
it, get the URL, get the email address of the person that's
running the script, and then using Gmail app, send them the
link to that document.
There's the email address.
There's the subject, and there's the body.
So hopefully, this kind of got you started.
This was probably your very first Google Apps Script.
There's a lot more of what Apps Script can do.
Go take a look at our documentation.
Go walk through other tutorials that we have.
And we're very excited to see what you can build.
Thank you very much.