[obeattie]

I’ve been thinking about going the other way a bit recently: having bots consume input from and add their output to a Google Doc.

There are so many processes in most businesses which involve many humans collaborating on templatised documents. Google Docs/Sheets fits into these workflows very well, but there’s often scope for some partial automation in there too - pulling information from databases and outside sources and keeping it in sync, etc. Developing custom web apps for each case is too much effort for too little reward, takes users out of a familiar (and well-liked) interface which updates in real-time, makes you reimplement permission models, etc.

Not something I’ve explored properly yet so I don’t know if the APIs are rich enough to make this easy, but I would really like to give it a look.

[pier25]

I used that approach for a reporting system and it worked pretty well. It was easy to hit the sheets api rate limit but it was just a matter of waiting a bit between requests.

The node script was triggered hourly with Heroku scheduler.