July 2016 Summaries

This book focuses on building a customizable dashboard using Google Sheets, leveraging its built-in features and add-ons to turn numbers into clear, actionable insights. The author walks through the process of creating a basic dashboard that tracks core metrics such as users, sessions, bounce rate, organic traffic, and month-over-month growth. The dashboard is then enhanced by adding more dimensions to track new user sources, and data is pulled from external apps using Zapier integrations or Google Sheets add-ons. The book aims to empower readers to build their own custom dashboards with ease, automating the process of tracking key metrics and presenting them in a visually appealing format.

Google Apps Script is a powerful tool that allows users to build custom add-ons for various Google apps, including Gmail, Google Sheets, and Google Drive. With its JavaScript-based interface, users can create scripts to automate tasks, extend app functionality, and integrate with other services. The script editor provides an easy-to-use environment for coding, and the documentation offers extensive guidance on using the tool. Users can create standalone scripts that perform system-wide functions or bound scripts that extend the functionality of a specific file in one of their Google apps. Bound scripts are more common and provide a way to automate tasks directly within the app. The script editor also allows users to publish scripts for others to use, making it a valuable resource for collaboration and community sharing. By leveraging Google Apps Script, users can create custom solutions that streamline their workflow, enhance productivity, and increase efficiency.

The text highlights the versatility of Google Sheets in managing various aspects of writing and publishing, such as maintaining an editorial calendar, tracking published items, building detailed outlines, importing data from websites and feeds, creating linked text, displaying images from a URL, generating HTML tables for blog posts, and more. With its flexible columns and number-centric tools, spreadsheets can be used to automate tasks, clean up copy, translate text, and perform other bulk text editing tasks. The book focuses on Google Sheets, but many of the same steps would work in other spreadsheet tools. By leveraging the best features built into Google Sheets, users can create a powerful CRM system for managing their editorial process.