By @mhawksey

Notes on the future of Google Apps Script from Google Cloud Next ‘18 #GoogleNext18

At Google Cloud Next ‘18 it was great to see and hear about a number of G Suite and Google Apps Script updates. In the past when I’ve presented on App Script a common question used to be what was the sustainability of the product. Given the continued investment in Google Apps Script and it’s integration within other Google products like AdSense, Data Studio and App Maker to name a few, the future looks very promising. There were also some impressive stats shared about Google Apps Script at Next: 3.3B weekly executions; 8.7M weekly end users; and 270K weekly developers.
Google Apps Script Stats
Some of those 270K developers had the opportunity to meet-up at Next, many meeting face-to-face for the first time, as well as an opportunity to speak to some of the Googlers who are supporting Apps Script developers.

As part of Next ‘18 there were a number of sessions introducing and highlighting user stories, a summary of some of these have been highlighted in this list compiled by Wesley Chun and I’ve created a YouTube playlist of recorded sessions).

Getting up to speed – recent updates

If you have a look at the Google Apps Script release notes even before Next ‘18 there have been a number of recent updates which includes:

Other recent announcements include the Hangouts Chat Bots, which can be powered by Google Apps Script, were announced in February 2018, news of Calendar Add-ons broke in June 2018 and the Google Sheets Macro Recorder was launched in April 2018.

Launched and roadmap developments from Google Next ‘18

Launched

Announced at Next ‘18 were:

Coming soon

Announced as ‘coming soon’ were a number of core updates to Google Apps Script :

Update: Most of the roadmap updates were talked about in the Automating G Suite: Apps Script & Sheets Macro Recorder session at Next ’18 embedded below:

Apps Script Training Resources

As part of Next ‘18 the event was top and tailed with a number of boot camps including one on “Power your apps with Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Sheets, Slides and more”. The codelabs used as part of these is available for free from the following links:

There were other product updates announced at Next ‘18 and of particular interest are updates to Google Sheets which have been compiled in a post by Ben Collins. Overall the future of Google Apps Script looks very healthy…

Exit mobile version