This was a program i decided to make because of a hole in the software supply (that or my poor googling skills). This was during my placement year, when i met so many new people that I struggled to keep track of all of them. So i felt the need to keep notes of these professional relationships just for the purpose of small talk before meetings or coffee breaks.
But doing so is very chaotic if done through simple notes. So i used my coding superpowers to make the process more efficient. The use case scenario would be:
1. type the name of the person
2. Type the associated note
3. Move on with the day
When reviewing notes, I’d go to an online spreadsheet and my program would have filtered and organised everything by person (or could be other things, i could have a record called groceries where i put groceries notes).
This is useful because if i have a 9 am meeting in the morning with John from Accounting, i can pop up John on my spreadsheet and see what we talked about last time.
Again, very lightweight. Google Apps Scripts are great! You can whip up a program in seconds from any computer in the world, no databases, no html. The spreadsheet is your database, you can change it manually or programmatically, love it.
What my script does is listen to a specific form (where I type John and write out the related note) and update a spreadsheet. That’s pretty much it, the rest is just the program logic.
1. write notes on the form 2. Press send 3. Read notes from the spreadsheet
If i didn’t have such a tool, I wouldn’t even have bothered with this whole thing. But since all it took was something like 100 lines of code, the value proposition of this project skyrocketed.
This is useful because is a middle ground between those sophisticated productivity apps and the simple note app on your phone.