Help from fellow coders on Google Apps

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I need help from anyone that is familiar with the Google Apps environment.

I know it has nothing to do with Chrono, and that there may be better places to ask for this, but I’ve found this community to be more trustworthy and quicker to respond than other places.

To make a long story short, there’s this old couple(not that old) with a small business, they wanted to improve it by having a small system to run it, being the only tech guy they know, they asked me if I could do it, and I said "yea, it should be easy", it mostly was…

Currently, I’m having problems with what would be the UI, figuring out what to do to allow them to check the info in the system or make new entries on it.

Basically, Google Forms sucks for what they need and they changed the way Google Sites works, so you can’t use your own custom HTML pages, and have to use their horrid page editor for these purposes, so I’m looking for advice on what to do.

If anyone wants to help me a bit on this then I’ll go into more details about it, I can’t offer much in return but a little drawing made by yours truly like the one bellow with a copious amount of my deepest gratitude.

BeanBagBear
BeanBagBear512×512 65.3 KB

I’ll be patiently waiting for any comments on the matter…
well… actually, I’ll be checking this thread in about 12hours, promise!

Seriously, I would really want this done by Wednesday if possible but I’m lost on what to do, and I don’t want to disappoint them, not to mention that this has been eating a large amount of my free time as of late.

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I think your post is unclear. Please help us help you by letting us know the following:

  1. Are you adamant on using Google Apps or are you looking for alternative software?
  2. Are you running said Apps on PCs as well as mobile or just PC? What OS?
  3. What suites exactly are you trying to use and for what purposes?

That said, pardon my French, Google is absolutely shite and their Google Forms is rabid dog excrement.

I don’t understand if you’re trying to create a website or what. I re-read your post many times but I honestly don’t understand what you want to do.

Instead of Google Forms, try:

https://tellform.com/

Instead of Google Sites, try:

I hope this helps, somehow?

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I wish i could help, not sure exactly what you mean but i’m assuming it does mean you need to use google based services. Is there not a way to import a script in to do what you want in google sites? Or is the problem the visual look? It sounds like quite an annoying problem anyway.

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Thank you for chiming in, I did say I’ll elaborate further if needed :thinking:

  • It has to be on Google Apps as per request, the business is not that big, but mobility and ease of access is required, not to mention free, plus, they already have google accounts.
  • If you have acces to a browser be either on phone, tablet, or pc, then you should be able to use it.
  • Exerrrmh… I mean Sheets, and is mostly to keep inventory and do some minor accounting procedures, which is all done by the way.

I agree with your french, hence why I’m asking if someone knows of a better way to do this, I’ll check TellForm, also Mobirise and Pagekit, since they picked my interest, but I doubt they are what I need right now.

@dogetail Pretty much, google services as requested, and the problem is pretty much the visual aspect of it plus a little bit of data entry points.

Basically, I need to figure out how two do two things:

  1. A registry form, where they introduce info about a shipment, it has to work off-line and allow for half entries that can be completed later, which Google’s can’t do, allow me to do a good amount of customization in the visual part of it would be great, TellForm seems to be a good choice for this, I’ll be checking that one out.
  2. Create a user interface from which the data in the database can be viewed and managed easily without having to deal with spreadsheets because old people you see.

Both of those need to be free, as in no monthly fees and readably available over the internet, the last thing I want to do is having them install an app on any new device they need to use, although the more I think about it the more it seems like the only option I’ll have.

The website was only to use it as the database interface, it would be a private site that only two people would be using, but I’m open to anything.

It used to be that you could put any HTML page in your site, but some morsel decided that was too complicated for web developers, so now you only get this stupid jigsaw builder interface with that Google UI feeling all over the place, where the best you can do is put some embedded code surrounded by tons of white space, an environment that doesn’t even fully works with scripts any more by the look of it wtf?

Anyway, the idea was to make a small website like interface where they could interact with the data in a more intuitive way and that could be viewed in a single screen from anywhere they were.

Thanks for the interest thou, very apreciated.

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Welcome to the future, where every site you visit wants you to install their shitty app. And in the case of Amazon, actively redirecting you to their app. Absolutely irritating.

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Maybe the problem is the requirements are too precise. Is there no way to build it using technologies familar to you and using a third party application to link it perhaps google intergration. Or just ask them to be more flexible about it.

Well here are some links to things anyway. Mostly mobile app builders though.

There is this though for app and service intergration has drag and drop ui but its not i suppose what u want.

This is also owned by google is is supposed to be compatible with database related operations

Google cloud is a google service which is flexible and useful to use with things but i suppose it isnt free.

https://webdesigner.withgoogle.com
A webdesigner with google intergration.

Free google website hosting

I wish you luck with it.

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Google Apps Script is the intermediary Google service for expanding Google Apps into custom use case scenarios like your project. It’s mostly just plain old JavaScript code you’ll have to write but but the real power comes in now that you can introduce almost any other Google service’s API into your project’s code. I don’t really know where you should start reading from in the docs, that link will eventually lead you to it though. Sheets API & Apps Script menus might be relevant pages to read as well. :face_with_monocle:

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