Assign Google Workspace licences for individuals without the Admin Console

The following Google Apps Script is designed to automate the assigning of a Google Workspace (e.g. Education Plus) licence in the Google Admin Console, for individual accounts/users by providing them with a quick Google Form to submit.

This saves having to manually go into the Google Admin Console and assign a licence. All the user has to do is tick the box on the Google Form, they will receive an automated confirmation email and their new licence will be applied within 24 hours.

You can refer to the Google product and SKU IDs webpage if you need to assign a different licence type. There is some basic checking to see if an account/user is an 'Administrator' and it will therefore prevent them from getting a licence.

Screenshot of the Google Form title used for submission

Check date in future and a Wednesday

The following Google Apps Script is designed to check that a date submitted via a Google Form is both in the future and falls on a Wednesday. This was developed as part of a newsletter submission process to help validate information and inform a user when they had not followed the instructions. It has been developed for UK dates and may need adjusting for your own time zone.

Google Form question asking for a date to be entered.

Exponential Backoff

The following Google Apps Script is designed to explore Exponential Backoff - a process by which when something fails you try again a set number of times whilst increasing the delay between each attempt, up to a certain point.

I needed this for a tool I built which adds Guests to a Calendar event from a Google Form submission. Whilst I was using ScriptLock to prevent simultaneous submissions, the code ran so fast that it would infrequently trip the Calendar API with the following error message "API call to calendar.events.patch failed with error: Rate Limit Exceeded".

By infrequently I mean a reported issue only once in 3,500 submissions over the course of 12 months. Enough however to take the opportunity to learn about Exponential Backoff and to squash that single instance.

Just a note that this is one way to implement it.

Sample Apps Script code for Exponential Backoff

Copy or move file into folder Tool

The following Google Apps Script tool allows you to quickly copy or move existing files into existing folders within Google/Shared drive. This is quite a niche tool so it is anticipated you would already have a Google Sheet of file IDs/URLs, though there is the option to select an existing Drive folder of files and automatically bring them into this tool.

You can continue to append further rows to the Google Sheet as existing ones will be skipped once the ‘Status’ column has automatically been marked as ‘Completed’. Alternatively you can clear the Sheet each time for a fresh start.

Quickly copy or move existing files into folders via a Google Sheet

Append Drive folder permissions Tool

The following Google Apps Script tool allows you to quickly append new permissions to existing folders within Google/Shared drive. This is quite a niche tool so it is anticipated you would already have a Google Sheet of folder IDs/URLs, though there is the option to select an existing Drive folder of folders and automatically bring them into this tool.

This tool is a modified version of the Append Drive files permissions tool.

By inserting email addresses using a comma-and-space format you can optionally select to send a notification email to the new user(s).

You can continue to append further rows to the Google Sheet as existing ones will be skipped once the ‘Status’ column has automatically been marked as ‘Completed’. Alternatively you can clear the Sheet each time for a fresh start.

Quickly append new folder permissions via a Google Sheet

Append Drive file permissions Tool

The following Google Apps Script tool allows you to quickly append new permissions to existing files within Google/Shared drive. This is quite a niche tool so it is anticipated you would already have a Google Sheet of file IDs/URLs, though there is the option to select an existing Drive folder of files and automatically bring them into this tool.

By inserting email addresses using a comma-and-space format you can optionally select to send a notification email to the new user(s).

You can continue to append further rows to the Google Sheet as existing ones will be skipped once the ‘Status’ column has automatically been marked as ‘Completed’. Alternatively you can clear the Sheet each time for a fresh start.

Quickly append new file permissions via a Google Sheet

Check comma separated email address is valid

The following Google Apps Script is designed to loop through a Google Sheet cell of email addresses that have been separated by a comma and space. It then uses a regular expression (regex) to confirm the email address meets the correct formatting criteria.

This code was developed as a way of implementing additional checks when asking users to be precise in how exactly they enter multiple email addresses. So if they were to forget the space for instance it could alert them, before the rest of the code risked failing as whatever task it was designed to do.

Regular expression to check the format of an email address

Change Drive ownership without email notification

The following Google Apps Script is designed to change ownership of a Google Drive item without sending the default email notification to the new owner. Please note this will only work within your organisation (i.e. on the same domain) and not between personal Google account (where consent is required by Google).

Snippet of code for changing Drive ownership