My live Google Form response in Google Sheets won’t update in another Sheet Tab that references them. What do I do?

Google Sheets – Intermediate, Arrays, Form Data

Picture this. You have set up your Google Sheet and attached your Google Form data to it so you might get a tab that looks a little something like this:

Form Response Tab Google Sheets

You probably don’t want to mess with this tab because the Form is still live.

Instead, you decide to create a new Google Sheet tab that you want to automatically transfer all the data into, including the current form response data and any new form responses you might get.

The Common Mistake

A common, though mistaken, approach to this is to do a cell-by-cell transfer of data. For example, we would grab the first data cell of our “Form responses 1” Sheet tab and in a new sheet tab cell we would write:

We would then drag that cell across to the right to cover all the columns. Then all the way down to the bottom of the page to cover the current responses and any new responses added.

That might look a little like this:

Cell-by-cell display of data from another Sheet Tab

The problem

This looks like it might work, right? Let’s test it out by adding in a new form response. For me, it will be the 6th response and will appear on row 7 of the ‘Form  Responses 1’ sheet tab.

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Google Apps Script – URL Fetch JSON data from an API and add it to a Google Sheet – Ripple API example

Google Apps Script – UrlFetchApp, SpreadsheetApp, Ripple API, Time Triggers

I have been very fortunate of late to have the patronage of the Ripple XRP cryptocurrency community via XRP Tip Bot and Coil. This is no small part due to the support of user Recreational Rex from Twitter.

Full disclosure here, I don’t really know all that much about cryptocurrencies. I knew about Bitcoin and Ethereum but really didn’t really invest any time and money into looking at these growing forms of value exchange.

But now I’m a little curious.

I thought it would be fun to see what the value of XRP was against a fairly standard metric like the USD and keep a record of this exchange rate daily over a month or so (Mrs Yagi just read the ‘fun‘ in the last sentence and rolled her eyes).

I also thought it would be pretty cool to see how many exchange providers (Gateways) that conduct USD-XRP exchanges are around and see if there is much difference their exchange rate day-to-day among them.

Fortunately for me, the XRP Ledger provides a freely available open-source ledger that can be accessed via the Ripple Data API. The API can return JSON objects from which we can extract the data we need.

Of course, to record and display the daily exchange-rates I went straight to Google Sheets. I gathered the relevant XPR data using Google Apps Script’s UrlFetchApp Class and pushed it to my Google Sheet with SpreadsheetApp Class.

Here is a live embed of the XRP Google Sheet that is updated via a daily time trigger via Google Apps Script.

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Google Apps Script: Delete Rows Based on a Column’s Cell Value in Google Sheet

Google Apps Script, SpreadsheetApp, Google Sheet, Iteration

A not too uncommon task for Google Sheets users is to delete rows based on a cell’s values in a certain column. Often you don’t want to change the row position of the values so sorting the values and then deleting them in blocks is out.

All you want to do is iterate through the rows in the Sheet searching your selected column for the text or value that will trigger your code to remove the assigned row. Then delete the row.

Rinse and repeat until all rows have been checked.

This task can be automated with Google Apps Script in a number of ways depending on the size of your data set.

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Google Apps Scripts: Create Time Triggers to automatically send email task reminders from a Google Sheets check list

Google Apps Script: Time Triggers, ClockTriggerBuilder, ScriptApp

One of the most powerful things about Google Apps Script is the ability to automatically complete tasks with time-driven triggers. You can set up your code to run any one of your functions in your script by the minute, hour, day, week, or month. You can even set it to run based on a specific date.

Have a look at the time-driven trigger options below:

    • Specific Date and Time: Based on: YYYY-MM-DD HH: MM format
    • Minute: Every minute or every 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes.
    • Hour: Every hour or every 2, 4, 6, 8 or 12 hours.
    • Day: At a time within an hourly bracket. For example:
      • Midnight to 1 am,
      • 3 pm to 4 pm
  • Month: On a specific day of a calendar month at a specific time. For example:
      • Every 3 day of the month at between 3 am and 4 am.

There are two approaches to setting up these time-based triggers. The first one is by simply using the Trigger creator inside the G Suite Developer Hub. This allows you to select the function that you want to add a trigger to for your project and fill out a simple form to determine when you want your trigger to run.

Gsuite Developer hub time trigger

Alternatively, you can create a time trigger programmatically using the ClockTriggerBuilder class.

In this tutorial, we will build on a previous project we’ve called The Badger, that contains a task check off Google Sheet. If the user does not check off their sheet by the due date, then we can send them an HTML email reminder.

Google Apps Script email remind from Google Sheet The Badger 2

Don’t worry, I will provide the starter code and the Google Sheet for you in a minute. However, if you want to learn how I created the email reminder for The Badger you can follow the tutorial here:

Google Apps Script: Create an HTML email reminder service from Google Sheet data.

If you want to see how I created the Spreadsheet, you can check out this link:

Google Sheets: How to create a task completion check sheet.

Setting Up

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