UrTrix - UnRevealed Tricks

You have been using Google Sheets for budgeting and business but there’s another interesting use of spreadsheets - you can use them to create impressive pixel paintings in minutes. Marina and Mallory created a bright and beautiful wall mural using Google Sheets. Japanese artist Tatsuo Horiuchi uses Microsoft Excel to draw masterpieces. The idea is simple. Each cell in the spreadsheet corresponds to a pixel in the painting. You find the color of the pixel and set that as the background color of the corresponding cell in the sheet. Now resize the cells in small perfect squares and your spreadsheet will resemble the original artwork. How to Paint with Google Spreadsheets If you would like to create your own spreadsheet art but don’t have the time to carefully paint every cell manually, here’s a simple workaround for you. You can take any photograph, vector art, GIF, or any other image and use Google Sheets to convert that bitmap image in...

With Google Apps Script, you can easily create a Web App that serves HTML, JSON, XML or plain text output using the HTML service. When your publish your Google Script project as a web app, the script gets a public URL (think API) that can be invoked from external applications using either HTTP GET or POST requests with query parameters and request body. When publishing the script as a web app, make sure to choose “Allow anonymous access” and execute the script as yourself. If you edit the script, create a new version inside the script editor and deploy the latest version. Here are some examples that demonstrate how you can convert your Google Script into a web API by adding the doGet and doPost methods to your project. Handling GET Requests When a script is published as a web app, the doGet callback function handles all GET requests made to the script’s public URL. The Google Script can return plain text content, HTML or JSON data as shown in the examples below: Return Text...

You can hide entire rows in Google Sheets manually or use filters to hide any rows that matches the specified criteria. For instance, if you have a sheet containing orders from different countries, you can set up a country filter to hide all rows where the country is not the United States. If you have a Google Script that iterates through each row in the Google Sheet for performing actions on the row, like sending emails  or merging documents , you can check for the hidden and filtered rows and easily skip them from the workflow. There are two ways to check for hidden and filtered rows in Google Sheets. You can either use the SpreadsheetApp service of Google Scripts or use the Spreadsheet V4 API. Check for hidden rows with Google Scripts function getHiddenAndFilteredRows ( ) { var sheet = SpreadsheetApp . getActiveSheet ( ) ; var data = sheet . getDataRange ( ) . getValues ( ) ; for ( var d = 0 ; d < data . length ; d ++ ) { // Row Index start...

The XML Sitemap file is like a directory of all web pages that exist on your website or blog. Google, Bing and other search engines can use these sitemap files to discover pages on your site that their search bots may have otherwise missed during regular crawling. The Problem with Blogger Sitemap Files A complete XML sitemap file should mention all pages of a site but that’s not the case if your blog is hosted on the Blogger or blogspot platform. Google accepts sitemaps in XML, RSS, or Atom formats. They recommend use both XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds for optimal crawling. The default atom RSS feed of any Blogger blog will have only the most recent blog posts – see example . That’s a limitation because some of your older blog pages, that are missing in the default XML sitemap file, may never get indexed in search engines. There’s however a simple solution to fix this problem. Generate XML Sitemap for your Blogger Blog This section is valid for both regular Blogger blogs...

Mail Merge for Gmail gives you can easy option to add an “Unsubscribe” link to all your outgoing email campaigns. When an email recipient clicks the unsubscribe link, the status of their email address is set to UNSUBSCRIBED and you will not able to send email campaigns to unsubscribed users in your future mail merge campaigns. You can also manually resubscribe any unsubscribed contact if they have unsubscribed from your campaigns by accident. How to Include Unsubscribe Link in Mail Merge Inside your Google Sheet, go to Addons > Mail Merge with Attachments > Configure Mail Merge and expand the section that says “Enable Email Tracking”; Provide a Campaign Name, check the option that says “Include an Unsubscribe Link” and also provide the text of the unsubscribe link. How Unsubscribe Works in Mail Merge When the unsubscribe option is checked, all outgoing emails sent through Gmail Mail merge will include a remove link in the message footer automatically.  The subscr...

The Mail Merge for Gmail app lets you include an unsubscribe link in your email message. If a user clicks the unsubscribe link to opt-out of your mailing lists, you’ll not be able send future email campaigns to that email address. You can always send emails to the unsubscribed user manually via Gmail but they will not be included in the email campaigns sent via Mail Merge for Gmail. Reactivate an Email Address If your contact has unsubscribed their email address from your mailing list accidentally, or if you manually unsubscribed a user from your email system, you can easily reset their subscriber status from withing the Mail merge app. You’ll then be able to resume sending email campaigns to the resubscribed user via Mail Merge. Resubscribe email addresses manually Open your Google Sheet, go to the addons menu, select Mail Merge with Attachments, choose Email Campaign Reports and then choose Resubscribe Contacts. On the next screen, type one or more email addresses that y...

Google Photos is the best service for backing up your digital photos to the cloud. They have no storage restrictions, you can upload images as well as videos, and the built-in visual search engine helps you find photos by faces or objects in the picture. There’s one feature though that’s still missing in Google Photos. You can easily share your photos with anyone using a simple link but Google Photos offers no option for you to embed an existing image into a website. That is, if you have already uploaded an image onto Google Photos, you can’t directly embed it into your website through Google Photos. I wrote an app to help you embed #GooglePhotos in your website https://t.co/cDt4NorvWi pic.twitter.com/mq7J4h4qzj — Amit Agarwal (@labnol) October 25, 2016 Google Photos as an Image Host Embed Google Photos  is a new web app that, as the name suggests, makes it extremely easy for you to pick any image hosted on Google Photos and place it on a web page using simple HTML code. ...

When people submit your Google Form, a new row is inserted in the Google Sheet that is storing the form responses. This spreadsheet row contains a Timestamp column, the actual date when the form was submitted, and the other columns in the sheet contain all the user’s answers, one per column. You can extend the Google Forms sheet to also include formula fields and the cell values are automatically calculated whenever a new row is added to the sheet by the Google Form. For instance: You can have an auto-number formula that assigns an auto-incrementing but sequential ID to every form response. It can be useful when you are using Google Forms for invoicing . For customer order forms, a formula can be written in Google Sheets to calculate the total amount based on the item selection, the country (tax rates are different) and the quantity selected in the form. For hotel reservations forms, a formula can automatically calculate the room rent based on the check-in and check-out date fille...