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Google Docs Gets an API For Task Automation (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the come-and-get-it dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google today announced the general availability of a new API for Google Docs that will allow developers to automate many of the tasks that users typically do manually in the company's online office suite. The API has been in developer preview since last April's Google Cloud Next 2018 and is now available to all developers. As Google notes, the REST API was designed to help developers build workflow automation services for their users, build content management services and create documents in bulk. Using the API, developers can also set up processes that manipulate documents after the fact to update them, and the API also features the ability to insert, delete, move, merge and format text, insert inline images and work with lists, among other things.

The canonical use case here is invoicing, where you need to regularly create similar documents with ever-changing order numbers and line items based on information from third-party systems (or maybe even just a Google Sheet). Google also notes that the API's import/export abilities allow you to use Docs for internal content management systems.

6 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. ... until two weeks later, when they casually ment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... until two weeks later, when they casually mention in a blog post somewhere that they have removed it.

  2. VBA macros for Google Docs! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Google Docs gets malware macros. Welcome to the big leagues! What could possible go wrong?

    1. Re:VBA macros for Google Docs! by Narcocide · · Score: 2

      Well, someone could write an anti-virus program in JavaScript, which would then subsequently exhaust the entirety of the world's computing resources. Poof, no more bitcoin. Sound bad enough?

  3. Congratulations, Google by Voyager529 · · Score: 2

    This sounds like a "Macro" with more steps. Welcome to the 1980's.

  4. Re:Invoices need to be electronic. by Mr.No · · Score: 2

    Rant.. Invoices are generated by a computer and then get typed into the receivers computer by a human. Super inefficient and prone to error. Invoices need to be electronic and this needed to happen years ago. Iâ(TM)m not talking about special cases for big business. This is a small business problem and needs to happen in atime ftware such as quickbooks without vendor lock-in.

    Exactly. More than 30 years after the usage of computers in most businesses it is shocking to see 100 pages invoices being sent as PDF files and then some other company either typing them into their accounting system or attempt to OCR, push into Excel and then process. Why can't the business analysts, IT people and accounting department sit around a table? The generation of the initial PDF should surely come from an accounting system isn't it?

  5. Re:... until two weeks later, when they casually m by slack_justyb · · Score: 2

    They'll have a framework for that API to automatically remove uses of the replaced API, the framework however will require the use of a new programming language of which they've got a handy SDK for converting Go, C++, and Java into the new programming language which then "compiles" into a 126MB JavaScript blob.