The more I use Google Sheets, the more I am impressed by the insane possibilities of Google Sheets Apps Script. And since these days I am experimenting a ton with programmatic SEO, I am discovering some compelling use cases of the Apps Script.
While I have known and occasionally used Google Sheets for years, my use cases were not serious until the start of 2022 when I got into pSEO. I am running some serious automation by using Google Sheets, ever since. Initially, I just got started with simple formulas, like the one in the tweet below:
But as I progressed, I wanted more automation, and then I discovered the Apps Script option under the Extensions menu. At the very first, I spent several days and was finally able to connect the OpenAI API (the Davinci model at the time) to the Google Sheets file, and things started from there.
Over the next few weeks, my setup became so complex and sophisticated that I was processing 1000s of rows of data through the OpenAI API at the time. Though Davinci model was very cheap to use, I was still spending more than $100 on my OpenAI bills.
Exciting times!
A while later, I wanted to automatically take screenshots of several hundred (or thousand, I think) web pages, and guess what I used? Again, the Apps Script along with an external API for taking screenshots. Then I wanted to automatically fetch the titles and/or H1s from webpages, again, the Apps Script came to the rescue. As my Google Sheets files for pSEO started getting bigger as I kept adding more and more data, it was necessary to keep track of duplicates. And yet again, I created a custom function that searched the added term with all the previous terms and then all duplicates would get highlighted.
As I am not a developer, initially, it was very difficult to write these custom scripts. But then later, ChatGPT got launched, and it used to write working custom scripts in minutes which earlier took me days, or at least hours. And then GPT-4 came, it all became even better.
I created several simple tools, like a website uptime monitor tool that automatically kept checking websites and sent emails if a site went down. How cool, right?
The best thing that I like about Google Sheets is that scripts can run in the background at specified times, much like corn jobs. And now the situation is that I can’t imagine most of my workflow today without using Google Sheets.
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