Students and working professionals use Google Docs every day to help enhance their productivity and collaboration. The ability to easily share a document and simultaneously edit it together are some of our users' favorite product features. However, many small businesses, corporations, and educational institutions often find themselves needing to automatically generate a wide variety of documents, ranging from form letters to customer invoices, legal paperwork, news feeds, data processing error logs, and internally-generated documents for the corporate CMS (content management system).
Mail merge is the process of taking a master template document along with a data source and "merging" them together. This process makes multiple copies of the master template file and customizes each copy with corresponding data of distinct records from the source. These copies can then be "mailed," whether by postal service or electronically. Using mail merge to produce these copies at volume without human labor has long been a killer app since word processors and databases were invented, and now, you can do it in the cloud with G Suite APIs!
While the Document Service in Google Apps Script has enabled the creation of Google Docs scripts and Docs Add-ons like GFormit (for Google Forms automation), use of Document Service requires developers to operate within the Apps Script ecosystem, possibly a non-starter for more custom development environments. Programmatic access to Google Docs via an HTTP-based REST API wasn't possible until the launch of the Google Docs API earlier this year. This release has now made building custom mail merge applications easier than ever!
Today's technical overview video walks developers through the concept and flow of mail merge operations using the Docs, Sheets, Drive, and Gmail APIs. Armed with this knowledge, developers can dig deeper and access a fully-working sample application (Python), or just skip it and go straight to its open source repo. We invite you to check out the Docs API documentation as well as the API overview page for more information including Quickstart samples in a variety of languages. We hope these resources enable you to develop your own custom mail merge solution in no time!
Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, Google Cloud
Google Cloud Next '18 is only a few days away, and this year, there are over 500 sessions covering all aspects of cloud computing, from G Suite to the Google Cloud Platform. This is your chance to learn first-hand how to build custom solutions in G Suite alongside other developers from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), systems integrators (SIs), and industry enterprises.
G Suite's intelligent productivity apps are secure, smart, and simple to use, so why not integrate your apps with them? If you're planning to attend the event and are wondering which sessions you should check out, here are some sessions to consider:
I look forward to meeting you in person at Next '18. In the meantime, check out the entire session schedule to find out everything it has to offer. Don't forget to swing by our "Meet the Experts" office hours (Tue-Thu), G Suite "Collaboration & Productivity" showcase demos (Tue-Thu), the G Suite Birds-of-a-Feather meetup (Wed), and the Google Apps Script & G Suite Add-ons meetup (just after the BoF on Wed). I'm excited at how we can use "all the tech" to change the world. See you soon!
Enterprises are always looking for ways to operate more efficiently, and equipping developers with the right tools can make a difference. We launched Team Drives this year to bring the best of what users love about Drive to enterprise teams. We also updated the Google Drive API, so that developers can leverage Team Drives in the apps they build.
In this latest G Suite Dev Show video, we cover how you can leverage the functionality of Team Drives in your apps. The good news is you don't have to learn a completely new API—Team Drives features are built into the Drive API so you can build on what you already know. Check it out:
By the end of this video, you'll be familiar with four basic operations to help you build Team Drives functionality right into your apps:
Want to explore the code further? Check out the deep dive blog post. In all, the Drive API can help a variety of developers create solutions that work with both Google Drive and Team Drives. Whether you're an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), System Integrator (SI) or work in IT, there are many ways to use the Drive API to enhance productivity, help your company migrate to G Suite, or build tools to automate workflows.
Team Drives features are available in both Drive API v2 and v3, and more details can be found in the Drive API documentation. We look forward to seeing what you build with Team Drives!
addresses = GMAIL.users().settings().sendAs().list( userId='me' ).execute().get('sendAs')
{ "sendAs": [{ "sendAsEmail": string, "displayName": string, "replyToAddress": string, "signature": string, "isPrimary": boolean, "isDefault": boolean, "treatAsAlias": boolean, "smtpMsa": { "host": string, "port": integer, "username": string, "password": string, "securityMode": string }, "verificationStatus": string }, ...] }
addresses = GMAIL.users().settings().sendAs().list( userId='me', fields='sendAs(sendAsEmail,isPrimary)' ).execute().get('sendAs')
Posted by Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, G Suite
At Google I/O 2016, we gave developers a preview of the Google Slides API. Since then, the gears have been cranking at full speed, and we've been working with various early-access partners and developers to showcase what you can do with it. Today, we're happy to announce that the Slides API v1 is now generally available and represents the first time that developers have ever been able to programmatically access Slides!
The Slides API breaks new ground, changing the way that presentations are created. No longer do they require manual creation by users on their desktops or mobile devices. Business data on inventory items like retail merchandise, homes/property, hotels/lodging, restaurants/menus, venues/events, and other "cataloged" assets can be instantly turned into presentations based on pre-existing slide templates. Traditionally, the sheer amount of data (and of course time[!]) that went into creating these slide decks made it unwieldy if done by hand. Applications leveraging the API can easily generate presentations like these, customized as desired, and in short order.
Developers use the API by crafting a JSON payload for each request. (We recommend you batch multiple commands together to send to the API.) You can think of these as actions one can perform from the Slides user interface but available programmatically. To give you an idea of how the new API works, here are what some requests look like for several common operations:
// create new slide (title & body layout) { "createSlide": { "slideLayoutReference": { "predefinedLayout": "TITLE_AND_BODY" } } }, // insert text into textbox { "insertText": { "objectId": titleID, "text": "Hello World!" } }, // add bullets to text paragraphs { "createParagraphBullets": { "objectId": shapeID, "textRange": { "type": "ALL" } } }, // replace text "variables" with image { "replaceAllShapesWithImage": { "imageUrl": imageURL, "replaceMethod": "CENTER_INSIDE", "containsText": { "text": "{{COMPANY_LOGO}}" } } }
If you're interested in seeing what developers have already built using the API, take a look at our initial set of partner integrations by Conga, Trello, Lucidchart, Zapier and more, as described in detail in our G Suite blog post.
To help you get started, check out the DevByte above from our new series dedicated to G Suite developers. In the video, we demonstrate how to take "variables" or placeholders in a template deck and use the API to generate new decks replacing those proxies with the desired text or image. Want to dive deeper into its code sample? Check out this blogpost. If you're not a Python developer, it'll be your pseudocode as you can use any language supported by the Google APIs Client Libraries. Regardless of your development environment, you can use similar "scaffolding" to generate many presentations with varying content for your users. Stay tuned for more videos that highlight other Slides API features.
The Slides API is available to projects in your Google Developers console today. Developers can find out more in the official documentation which features an API overview plus Quickstarts, sample code in multiple languages and environments, to bootstrap your next project. We look forward to seeing all the amazing slide deck generating applications you build with our first ever API!
