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Welcome to the first of our monthly AppSheet Community Roundup series! Check out our latest news and upcoming events, along with new Community feature updates.
Join us for AppSheet Office Hours on May 19th
For app creators, expressions are a powerful way to customize behavior and add sophisticated logic throughout your app, from incorporating conditional statements and managing lists, to extracting data from images, detecting user details, and much more.
However, it can be challenging to know which expressions to use where, and the best way to build them into your app to deliver the results you want.
Join us for AppSheet Office Hours on May 19th, where our experts will deep dive into all things AppSheet expressions, including:
- Types of expressions and when to use them
- How to build and test expressions
- Common use cases and live demos
As always, youโll have the opportunity to ask any questions (even if theyโre not directly related to the session topic) and receive answers live from AppSheet experts. Pro tip: the best way to get your questions answered is by adding them in advance to the comments section of the event page here!
Leverage AppSheet's new Apps Script integration capabilities and BigQuery connector, now with write access
Last month, we were thrilled to demonstrate the new Apps Script integration capabilities and the BigQuery connector enhancements in our monthly Office Hours session. In case you missed it, you can see the complete event recap here, which includes:
- An overview of the new Apps Script integration and BigQuery connector, now with write access
- How these feature updates help enhance app creation
- Example use cases, live demonstrations, supporting resources, and app templates
- Answers to your frequently asked questions
What do you think about these new features? Let us know in the comments!
Bonus: Share an app template using one of these capabilities to be featured in our next monthly roundup!
Coming soon: New and improved AppSheet Help Center
We're excited to announce that a new and improved AppSheet Help Center (support.google.com/appsheet) is targeted for release on Monday, May 16th!
The new AppSheet Help Center retains all existing articles, and addresses many of the usability issues that have been raised with our current doc site, including:
- More learning assistance such as videos, tutorials, and community tips that address common use cases
- Improved search and navigation
- Roadmap for using AppSheet to provide guidance on the overall app development process and what to do next
- Filter the AppSheet function list
- Content refresh to update or remove outdated content and implement stylistic changes
- Feedback on docs
Learn more in the original announcement post from @lizlynch here.
๐ฅณ Meet Graham Howe: AppSheet Community Member Spotlight
One of our favorite things to do is shine the spotlight on some of our most active Community members. One such member is Graham Howe (@graham_howe).
Read the full post to learn more about Graham, including why he contributes to the Community, example apps he's created, and several pieces of valuable advice for app creators.
Have additional questions for Graham? Add a comment on the post!
Community tip of the month: Pixel perfect paginated reports
We're continually impressed with all the tips and tricks members share in the AppSheet Community. Taking the time to share your knowledge, lessons learned, and recommendations goes a long way in helping app creators accomplish their goals with AppSheet. Thank you!
While there are so many tips to choose from, we wanted to highlight this tip posted last month by @SkrOYC on how to create "pixel perfect paginated reports." SkrOYC walks you through step-by-step how to use HTML/CSS to create customized reports, including headers, footers, chapters, an index, and a way to export as a professional PDF/attachment.
Here's a link to the sample app and here's the link to SkrOYC's tutorial post. Don't forget to share your appreciation by liking the post or adding a comment ๐
Top five contributors in April
We love to see how many of you are eager to participate in the Community's discussions. Letโs take a quick look at who contributed the most by replies authored and topics published in the month of April. Please meet our top five contributors:
Thank you @Steve, @Joseph_Seddik, @SkrOYC, @Marc_Dillon, and @Suvrutt_Gurjar!
Plus, a special shoutout for this month goes out to @Joseph_Seddik for authoring the most Accepted Solutions this month!
Are you ready to become our next top contributor? Learn all about how to contribute to the Community here.
Top three conversations in April
Here are our most popular discussions in the Google Cloud Community over the past month:
- Dynamic filters in dashboart ...Histogram that omits blank values โโfrom an enum column
- Moving to SQL - Images Column question
- Leverage AppSheet's New Apps Script Integration Capabilities and BigQuery Connector Enhancements [Event]
Looking for more topics and discussions? Visit the AppSheet Q&A or Tips & Tricks forums to join the conversation or start something new.
Community feature updates in April
The Community team continues to work hard to improve the Community based on your valuable feedback. Here are some recent updates to our Community features:
1. Loaded activity feed remains
When you click the "Load more" button on an Activity feed (like this one on the AppSheet Community home page), you're shown 10 additional posts in the feed. Previously, if you clicked on a post or went to a different Community page, and then clicked the back button in your browser, you would be taken back to the Activity feed page, but the additional loaded posts were no longer visible.
We've updated this behavior so that when you click the back button and return to the Activity feed page, all the additional posts that you loaded by selecting "Load more" are visible. With this change, you can more easily go from the Activity feed to the posts you're interested in reading and back again to the Activity feed without losing your spot.
2. Line, paragraph, and quote spacing
To help make it easier to read Community content, we've made a few updates to the spacing between lines, paragraphs, and quotes.
First, from the example below, you can see that the intra-paragraph and inter-paragraph spacing was previously very similar, making it difficult to differentiate the two.
Now however, the intra-paragraph line spacing is closer together and the inter-paragraph spacing is further apart, thereby creating a more visible distinction.
This is also true for lines between bulleted items. Spacing between one bulleted/numbered item to the next bulleted/numbered item used to be the same as the spacing between lines within the same bulleted/numbered item. So, we've increased the space between one bulleted/numbered item to the next so you can more easily see the difference between separate bulleted/numbered items.
Lastly, when using block quotes, the spacing between text and the block quote used to be very close together, making it difficult to see the difference between the text and the quote. We've updated this so now, there's larger spacing and an easier differentiation between the two.
3. Blue arrow added to the navigation bar
To help make the Community easier and faster to navigate, we've added a blue arrow button to the navigation bar, indicating that there are more items to see even when the size of your browser is smaller and not able to show all items in the navigation bar at once.
4. Reading direct messages on mobile
We love how many of you participate in the Community on the go, which is why we've been focusing on improving the mobile experience. In particular, we've updated the user interface for direct messages on mobile so that you can scroll to see the entire message (previously, only a small section of the message was visible).
We hope you enjoy our new feature updates and thank you to all our Community members who continue to make this space an engaging and informative place to be. If you have any feedback, please feel free to add your thoughts to the Community Feedback forum here or add a comment directly to this post.
Make sure you don't miss out on the latest Community news, activities, or opportunities by subscribing to News & Announcements. To do so, go to the Announcements page and click on the blue button that says "Subscribe." You can also learn more about how to manage your subscriptions and notifications in this article here.
Thanks everyone. Until next time!
The Google Cloud Community Team
