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So I hacked this together to add a little communication between my (current) favorite methods of staying on my financial track – Google docs and Google Calendar.  This is quick and dirty and reads from a spreadsheet the name of a Payee, the Date that a Payment is Due and the Amount Due.  It loads this information into an event on the user’s default calendar.  Note that this is something I threw together after walking through the first example and reading the API a bit, and it has no logic whatsoever.

As I spend more time on it over the next few days I’ll add the ability to read multiple items from multiple sheets – my organizational system gives me one sheet for each month of a given year.  I’d also like to add support for writing to a different calendar, as well as a to-do list or even my new favorite toy – GQueues.

The functionality I’m really looking for is the ability to populate the information from the spreadsheet to multiple sources, and have my to-do list or GQueues push out to each source when the item is completed, ultimately logging the date (and amount paid) back on the spreadsheet.  But I tend to get ahead of myself – that will probably require more checks in both directions that I will ever feel like writing.

Oh, and a disclamer – I’m no programmer, I just dabble.  If you want to talk to a coder, talk to my brother.

function GoogleAppScriptExample() { 
 var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet(); //gets the active spreadsheet
 var sheet = ss.getSheets()[0]; //gets the active sheet
 var payee = sheet.getRange("A3").getValue(); //you can figure the rest out yourselves, its not that complicated.
 var dateDue = sheet.getRange("B3").getValue();
 var amountDue = sheet.getRange("C3").getValue();
 Browser.msgBox("Payee: " + payee + " Due Date: " + dateDue + " Amount Due: " + amountDue); //turn off for real deployment
 var cal = CalendarApp.getDefaultCalendar();
 cal.createEvent(payee + ": " + amountDue, new Date(dateDue), new Date(dateDue));
}

Have fun – I’ll keep posting stuff as I get it done.

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