Category: Card Service

Adding Charts to Google Workspace Add-on Sidebar Apps with Apps Script

Creating dynamic charts in the sidebar of your Google Workspace Add-on can be an effective approach to getting across a lot of meaning in a somewhat confined space.

In this tutorial, we will use Google’s Chart API to generate a live chart, first from some static data and then live from an external data source like a Google Sheet. All with the help of a little Google Apps Script magic.

If you want to take things further still and learn how to create a dynamic chart dialogue overlay along with learning other approaches to displaying charts and handling errors, you can find this in the bonus material to my much larger and more details course Create and Publish Google Workspace Add-ons with Google Apps Script: Master Class. If you are already a course member, head over there now, ya magnificent legend you!

Let’s get into it!

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Create a Google Workspace Add-on file picker card with CardService that opens a Google Picker in an overlay window – Google Apps Script

Google Apps Script: Card Service, Google Workspace Add-on, Google Picker

So you have this awesome idea for a Google Workspace Add-on (GWAO), but you need to be able to select Google Drive files and folders as a part of your process.

Sure, you could just open up another tab and find the link and paste it in a text input or paragraph input in your Card Service build, but that is time-consuming and kinda defeats the purpose of the convenience of the sidebar.

Ideally, you would want a built-in File Picker class that would select the files and folders from the directories you need. Whelp… unfortunately, we don’t have that right now for Google Apps Script’s Card Service.

One approach might be to build out a file picker card selecting each parent’s files and folders and navigate through it like, say, a linked list. Now, I haven’t tried this approach, but looking at how slow and memory expensive it is to call your Google Drive through either Google Apps Script’s Drive App class or the Advanced Service Drive Class, I gave this a pass… for now… .

Instead, I decided to incorporate Googles File Picker API as a popup window from the sidebar, because, it’s kinda what it is designed for. Also, not gonna lie, the example at the bottom of the docs was a huge help (cough … copy and paste … cough)

Let’s take a look at what we are going to build.

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