Google Apps Script, Google Sheets, Javascript
If you have ever done any work in Google Sheets you might have come across the incredibly useful UNIQUE function. This function can take a single row or multiple rows and generate a list of unique cell values.
Sometime you might have a use case where you need to replicate the UNIQUE functionality in Google Apps Script. Maybe you are drawing in data from another source like an API, BigQuery or a database, or presenting your unique data in another format.
Whatever the case, knowing how to to create a unique array from a 1-dimensional array or a 2-dimensional array is an important part of your toolkit as a coding goat 🐐. This tutorial will look at how to create this with modern Javascript that is incorporated into the Google Apps Script language. And of course, we’ll focus our tutorial more on a Google Apps Script because that’s kinda our thing.
We’ll start off with a very basic example of creating a unique array from a 1-dimensional array in our code:
…and then build ourselves up to a final example by grabbing multi-column range of Google Sheet data from which we create a unique list and then display the total sum corresponding to each unique cell value in each of our associated unique columns. Something like this:
As we go through our examples I’ll display the runtime of the entire code. Runtime is not a perfect indicator of the performance of the script there are other factors that will influence the runtime, but it will do for our purposes. I think you will be surprised by how fast these scripts run.
Before we get started, let’s take a quick look at the sample data…
Continue reading “Creating Unique Ranges from 2D Arrays in Google Apps Script”