UrTrix - UnRevealed Tricks

A school is trying to create a Google Form where students can register their details. The form would have a drop-down of countries, the names of class teachers as a multiple choice question and a checkbox style question where students can pick one or more subjects. It is easy to create such a form inside Google Forms - here’s a sample form - but there are two issues: There’s too much data to type. For instance, the country down-down alone has a list of 250 countries and it would take some work for the form editor to manually type each choice in the question. The question choices in the form may change with time. In the previous example, some teachers may move out, new teachers may join in and the drop-down list in the form has to be updated manually every time there’s a change in the staff. Auto-Populate Questions in Google Forms with Google Sheets As with everything else in the world of Google Forms and Google Sheets, we can easily automate the process of adding question cho...

This guide describes how you can programmatically create user meetings in your Zoom account with the help of Google Apps Script and the official Zoom API. As a first step, go to the Zoom Developer Dashboard and create a new app . Choose JWT as the app type and make a note of the Zoom API key and secret. We can build Zoom apps with the OAuth2 library as well but since this app is only for internal use and will not be publish to the Zoom marketplace, the JWT approach is easier. The app would involve two step. We’ll connect to the /api.zoom.us/v2/users/ API to get the Zoom ID of current authenticated user. Next, we make a POST request to the /v2/users/<<ZoomUserId>>/meetings endpoint to create the actual Zoom meeting. The app can be enhanced to automatically add new participants to a meeting after they register their email address on, say, Google Forms. In that case, a POST request is made to /meetings/{meetingId}/registrants with the email address and first name of t...

The Mail Merge and Document Studio add-ons let you send personalized emails with the help of template markers. The markers automatically create a mapping between the column names in the Google Sheet and the variable fields in your email message. When the email is sent, the marker fields in the email message are replaced with the values from the respective columns of the sheet. Let’s say you have a column titled First Name in your Google Sheet and your email message body has a marker that says Dear , (also notice the comma in the end). Fill-in Fields If your Google Sheet rows has a value, say Alex, the text in the email message would read Dear Alex, . However, if the first name is not available for a particular row, the variable field would be replaced with a blank value and this first line in the email message would thus read Dear <space>, - something that you should totally avoid in personalized emails. There are two ways to deal with this issue. You can either cle...

This guide explains how you can easily create and manage hyperlinks in Google Sheets. An entire cell in the sheet, or specific text inside the cell, can be linked to external web pages. A cell can also contain multiple hyperlinks. If you type a web page address in a Google Sheet cell, it is automatically converted into a clickable hyperlink. You can add anchor text to plain hyperlinks for more accessible URLs. Hover your mouse over the hyperlink and click the Edit icon. Now add the anchor text in the Text input box and click the green Apply button. Alternatively, you may use the built-in HYPERLINK function in Google Sheet to create web links with (optional) anchor text. = HYPERLINK ( "https://www.labnol.org" , "Digital Inspiration" ) It is also possible to include multiple hyperlinks inside a single cell of the Google Sheet. Just type any text, include URLs in plain text and when you move the cursor out of the cell, the URLs are converted into hyperlinks...

You are organizing an online event - maybe a meeting on Zoom or a training session hosted on Google Meet - and you would like the attendees to add the event to their own calendars. Once added to their calendar, the event will act as an automatic reminder and attendees will get a notification when the conference is about to start. There are two way to go about this: You can create a new meeting in your online calendar (Google, Outlook or any other calendar) and add the individual attendees as guests so the event automatically gets added to their calendar as well. You can include an “Add to Calendar” link or button in your email messages, forms and website pages. Anyone can click the link to quickly save your event on to their calendars - see live demo . Create Add to Calendar Links for Emails and Websites The Add to Calendar app can create links that will let people quickly save your events on to their own calendars. You can create links and event reminder buttons for Goo...

A temporary email address is very useful when you don’t want to share your real email address with a website. There are a plethora of services - 10 Minute Email , Mailinator and MailDrop to name a few - that will mask your main email address behind a temporary alias and thus save your inbox from potential spam. The only problem with using disposable email addresses is that it requires some work. You first need to generate a temporary address, paste it into the web form and then manually check the disposable inbox for any new email. And if you require another temporary address the next day, the whole exercise has to be repeated. Disposable Email Addresses with Gmail Here’s a new, simplified workflow that will let you use Gmail itself as a disposable email service provider. You’ll have just one temporary email address to remember and every time your share that email on the Internet, you attach an expiry date. Any email messages sent to your disposable Gmail account after the expi...

SlideCasts let you combine YouTube videos and Google Sides / PowerPoint presentations in a single-player. The speaker video and the slides appear side-by-side and, as the video progresses, the slides auto-change in sync with the video. You can try a live demo of SlideCasts here . Just hit the play button on the YouTube video and you’ll notice that the slides will change at the 10s, 25s and 30s mark (configurable). SlideCasts can be really useful for educators involved in remote teaching. The teacher’s “talking head” video can be uploaded to YouTube and the lecture slides can be hosted on Google Slides. If your course slides are available as a PowerPoint presentation that will work as well since you can directly upload your PPT and PPTX files to Google Slides. How to Sync Presentation Slides with Video The first step is to install Creator Studio . Next go to slides.google.com and open any existing presentation. Go to the Addons menu inside Slides, choose Creator Studio and ...

It takes 2 easy steps to embed any Google Slides deck in your website. Open Google Slides, go to the File Menu and choose Publish to web. Your presentation becomes public and you are presented with an IFRAME HTML tag that you can copy-paste in any web page. < iframe src = " https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/xxxx/embed " frameborder = " 0 " width = " 800 " height = " 600 " > </ iframe > Customize your Google Slide Embeds The embedded Google Slides player can be easily customized by modifying the src attribute of the IFRAME tag. Auto Start the Embedded Slideshow Append start=true to the URL and the slideshow will auto-play as soon as someone opens your webpage. Or set start=false and the slideshow will only play when the visitor click the play icon in the slides player. Change the duration of slides With start set to true, you can add delayms=1000 to the URL to specify the time (in milliseconds) ...