Recreating Tufte’s famous weather chart with Google Sheets and Charts API

My Twitter feed is mostly populated with data-related resources and people, so I almost always find something new and shiny going on there to distract me.

Sometimes this can be a good thing though (and sometimes, it can be the best thing ever).

Take last Friday. I found myself procrastinating, browsing my home feed when I saw this tweet for the upcoming Microsoft Data Science summit:

Tufte temp chart tweet

What caught my eye was not the actual tweet, but the sumptuous weather visualization that I recognized as one of Edward Tufte’s famous creations.

I clicked through to the article, which linked to Tufte’s original chart (here) and a fantastic tutorial about re-creating the chart using R, from Brad Boehmke (which is actually the chart shown in the tweet above).

It looks at daily average temperature over a period of time and captures the historic min/max range, the normal range (95% confidence interval), the 2014 temperature line and picks out the highs and lows. It renders all of this information in a single, beautiful column/line combination chart.

Curiousity piqued, I wondered whether this would be possible with Google Sheets?

The short answer is….. Continue reading Recreating Tufte’s famous weather chart with Google Sheets and Charts API

Build time-based triggers in Apps Script projects to automate programs

Ever find yourself needing to repeat an action in your Google Sheets?

For example, on a recent client project I wanted to cycle through my spreadsheet data, compare it to another dataset and apply a matching algorithm. To do this and stay within the 6 minute execution limit for Apps Script, I split my data into “blocks” of 10 rows, counted how many blocks I had and then ran the matching algorithm once for each block until they’d all been processed.

By adding time-based triggers, I setup my Google sheet to do this automatically, rather than having me click a button each time.

Using Google Apps Script, you can add these time-based triggers programmatically, so they can run and stop automatically.

In this post I’m going to show a skeleton example of this time-based architecture, to which you can add your own functionality.

The entire code file is here on GitHub and the spreadsheet is available here (feel free to make a copy: File > Make a copy… and then you can open the script editor to modify the code).

Continue reading Build time-based triggers in Apps Script projects to automate programs