Generate Apps Script code using Google AI Studio

Key Takeaways

AI is rapidly changing the way we write and deploy code. Oftentimes, you can prompt AI models to write or debug your code for you. In some cases, you may not even need to write any code at all. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use Google AI Studio to create and deploy an AppScript project without writing a single line of code. Even if you've never used AppScript before, you can use Google AI Studio to generate Appcript code and get step-by-step instructions on how to test it out. Imagine you have a list of blog post titles in Google Sheets and you need to generate a clean URL friendly version to publish on your website. For example, my awesome blog post needs to be converted to my awesome blog post with hyphens and so on. You could try doing this with Google Sheets built-in functions like substitute, lower, reax, replace, and trim all nested together, but it could get very complicated and hard to read. A custom function makes this much cleaner and reusable. So, let's use AI to write a custom function for us. We'll start by opening Google AI Studio. AIS.google.com. Next, we'll open a chat window and enter our prompt. Our prompt has three sections. First, we're opening with what we want to build a Google Sheets custom function called slugify text that accepts one argument called input text. Next, we're going to give specific instructions on how the custom function should handle the input text. For example, it converts all text to lowercase, removes whites space and other characters that don't format well for website URLs, and returns a string containing the key words of the blog title, separated by hyphens. It also explains what the function should respond to if the text input is blank or empty. This helps ensure the function handles unexpected formats without throwing an error. Finally, the prompt requests that the code sample has comments that explain the code and key elements that ensure that Google Sheets will register the appcript code as a custom function. After entering the prompt, I hit run and wait for the results. Here we go. I have a working code sample with an explanation of how it works. Google AI Studio even provides a test function that I could run for my appcript project to see if it works as expected. Now, I just have to add the code to the AppScript project connected to my Google sheet. To do that, I click on the extensions menu and then click appcript. Then I paste the code I got from Google AI studio into the appcript project. Finally, I return to the sheet and start using the function. And voila, it works. So here you go, working appcript code without writing a single line of JavaScript. To learn other ways you can build using AppScript, check out our documentation.