UrTrix - UnRevealed Tricks

The prices of products listed on various Amazon shopping websites may vary every day and a simple Google Spreadsheet can help you monitor these price fluctuations via email. Just add the Amazon items in a spreadsheet and you’ll automatically get email alerts when their prices change on Amazon. You’ll thus never miss the deal again. Track Amazon Prices with Google Sheets The Amazon Price Tracker is easy to configure. All you have to do is add the links (URLs) of Amazon product pages inside a Google Spreadsheet. You can add monitor products across all Amazon.* websites. Here are the steps involved: Step 1: Generate Amazon Access Keys Open the Amazon Associates website and sign-in with your Amazon account. Next, click the Tools menu, choose Product Advertising API from the dropdown ( link ) and choose Manage Your Credentials under the Add Credentials section. Amazon will create an Access Key ID and a Secret Key that you’ll need in the next step. Step 2: Copy the Google Spreadsh...

Google has added a new font family – Lexend – that will help you read faster and better. The font is available inside Google Docs, Sheets and Google Slides or you can download it directly from the Google Fonts website and use it in offline apps like Microsoft Word. Here’s a sample Google document rendered with the Lexend Deca font. Thomas Jockin and Bonnie Shaver-Troup , the font designers, have also uploaded the font files on Github under the Open Font License which allows you to use, modify and redistribute the fonts freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. To enable the Lexend font in your copy of Google Docs, open a new document inside Google Docs, click the Font dropdown in the toolbar and select More Fonts . Search for Lexend and select them to add them to your default font list. The study suggests that students were able to increase their reading speed (total number of correct words read per minute) by 19.8% when the same document was formatted in the Lexe...

With Microsoft Powerpoint, you can easily convert your presentation decks into high-resolution video files for uploading to YouTube and other video sites. The exported video files can also include all the voice narrations and background audio that you may have included in the presentation. Google Slides doesn’t offer an option to save presentations as videos but there’s a new add-on in town – Creator Studio – that brings new export capabilities to your Google Slides. With Creator Studio, you’ll be able to save your decks as animated GIFs , image sequences and HD video (with audio). Watch the video tutorial   for a quick introduction. To get started, go to creatorstudio.dev and install the Google Slides add-on. It requests certain permissions as it has to read the presentation images for converting them into movies. It also requires access to creating files in your Google Drive since the exported files are automatically uploaded to your Google Drive. Once the add-on is i...

You have composed a draft email inside Gmail and would like to send the same message to multiple people, but separately. The subject, the email body, the attachments are common and the only thing that differs between each message is the recipient’s email address. Maybe you are sending your résumé  to multiple companies. How can you do this without having to copy-paste the subject and body of the draft message multiple times? Create Duplicate Email Messages in Gmail When you compose a draft email in Gmail and hit the Send button, the email is automatically removed from the Drafts folder and moved to the Sent Items folder. There are however two easy ways to create duplicate draft emails inside Gmail. You can either use Mail Merge for Gmail  or, if you are looking for a more simple one-click option, use the Duplicate Drafts feature available inside Email Studio. Here’s how to get started. Open your Gmail mailbox, compose a new email messag...

Introducing Email Spreadsheets , a Google Sheets add-on that lets you automate the reporting of spreadsheet data and dashboards by email. If you are an office worker who has been emailing spreadsheets to colleagues manually, this add-on will save you a ton of time. And because it runs on the Google Cloud, your spreadsheet reports will be delivered even while you are offline or on vacation. With Email Spreadsheets, you can schedule reports and it will automatically send them by email on a recurring schedule. You can email entire workbooks, specific sheets inside a workbook or even range of cells. Watch the video tutorial to get started. Email Google Sheets Automatically Go to the Google add-on store and install Email Google Sheets . Next, open any Google Spreadsheet in your Google Drive, go to the Add-ons menu inside the sheet, choose Email Spreadsheets from the dropdown and then choose Rules to create your first scheduled email report. You are presented with a 3-step wizard t...

In most organizations, employees are required to fill timesheets every week so the company can track the amount of time that people have spent working on various projects and tasks. My kids are in middle/high school and I’ve been looking for a timesheet-style solution that would help me understand their studying patterns and learn how much time they spend on various subjects. There are quite a few apps available for time tracking but I was looking for something simple and Google Forms fit the bill perfectly. The multiple-choice grid question is handy for quickly marking the time that they have spent on various subjects. I also added a Linear scale question for them to self-evaluate their daily screen time on a relative scale. Here’s how the final study log form looks like: The Email Form Notifications add-on is enabled for this Google Form so parents get an instant email when the boys submit the study log form. The email contains all the form answers in a neatly formatted table...

Google Apps Script makes it is easy for you to integrate data and functionality from Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, and most other Google APIs. Apps Script is JavaScript under the hood so you don’t have to learn a new language and you don’t have to manage any servers since all your code runs on the Google Cloud, not your browser. In this video tutorial, you’ll learn how to develop Google Apps Script projects locally on your computer inside Visual Studio Code. You can write your code in modern JavaScript, neatly organized in modules, and the build environment will use Babel and Webpack to transform your code into a version of JavaScript that is compatible with Apps Script. Modern Development with Google Apps Script There are quite a few advantages with having a local development environment vis-a-vis writing code in the Apps Script Cloud IDE. You can write code with ES6 Classes, Arrow Functions, Modules, Destructing and use all the other modern JavaScript features....

The web has made it incredibly easy for anyone to sell digital products directly to customers through websites, social media, and email newsletters. You can sell PDF ebooks, MP3 music, photos, software apps, gift cards, license keys, coupon codes, website templates, fonts, graphics, video courses, and many more downloadable files. While there are quite a few e-commerce platforms that help you sell digital products – Gumroad, E-junkie, Paddle, FastSpring, Shopify, Instamojo and WooCommerce, to name a few,  here’s a do-it-yourself solution that will help you build your own digital store in under 5 minutes using PayPal and your Google account. How the workflow works? Before we get into the implementation, here’s a big-picture view of how the payment and digital delivery workflow works. Embed the “Buy Now” buttons into your website or blog. Buyers can pay with all major credit cards using 1-step checkout. Buyer clicks the button, enters the card details and completes the pay...

This is a list of essential tools and services from my coding workflow that I think should be part of every web programmer’s toolkit. Whether you a building a simple “Hello World” app or a complex web application, these tools should make your coding easier and increase productivity. The Web Developer’s Toolkit 1. devdocs.io — API documentation for all popular programming languages and frameworks. Includes instant search and works offline too. 2. glitch.com — create your own web apps in the browser, import GitHub repos, use any NPM package or build on any popular frameworks and directly deploy to Firebase. 3. bundlephobia.com — quickly find the import cost (download size) of any package in the NPM registry. Or upload your package.json file to scan all dependencies in your project. 4. babeljs.io/repl — Write your code in modern JavaScript and let Babel transform your code into JavaScript that is compatible with even older browsers. 5. codeply.com — quickly build frontend resp...

With File Upload Forms ( demo ) for Google Sheets, you can receive large files from anyone directly in your Google Drive. You can automatically send email confirmations to the notify the form respondent. The forms can be created inside Google Sheets using the built-in drag-n-drop form builder and the forms can CAPTCHAs, e-signature and more. A school teacher may want to build forms for students to upload assignments and the files are automatically saved to her Google Drive but in separate student folders. The HR team may want an online form where job applicants can upload their resumes in PDF or Word format. Business can build forms with eSignatures that respondents can sign on their desktops and mobile phones. Google Forms do allow file uploads but the respondents need to be signed into their Google accounts before they can upload files. File Upload Forms impose no such limitations – anyone can upload files to your Google Drive. They may not have a Google account and they’ll still ...