Creating Google Docs programmatically — Tables

One task you can often find yourself having to complete is to create a report on some metrics for you boss. There are hosts of solutions out there that claim to help you by providing good dashboards, auto reporting, etc.

Even with those solutions I have often found myself going back to having to create some sheet, slide deck or just plain old documents to complete the reporting task. As reports, at least within a team/department/company/industry often have a similar structure to them having to manually copy paste templates every time felt counter productive.

And as an old mentor of mine (thanks PP) has once told me: “when you are doing something for the third time, it is time to think on automating that task”.

Google Documents

I work with google documents a lot at my work, hence it felt like a good idea to look into some of the automation possibilities there for the reporting.

Google Drive and Google Documents have very well documented and supported API’s/SDK’s for interacting with them. The basics i’ll go over maybe another time, but in this post i’ll specifically look at how to create a table.

For better or for worse, tables are the one thing every human can understand and read when it comes to metrics/reporting; This means that whether in a dashboard, a slide deck or a document you will often come across them.