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
