Hello world

Well, it has to start this way right? With the ubiquitous Hello World program, a program beloved of all beginner tutorials and computer books.

1. Create a new Google spreadsheet from the Drive home page and call it "Hello World".

2. On the menu bar, go to Tools > Script Editor…  which opens a new tab in your browser.

3. Delete the boilerplate code that is currently sitting in the main window and type in the following snippet of code:

function helloWorld () {
  Browser.msgBox("Hello World");
}

4. Save this script as "Hello World".

5. Hit run and switch back over to your Google spreadsheet.

6. Hey presto! There's a message box saying "Hello World"

Ok, what's this all about - I'll be posting my experiments and thoughts here as I learn to code. I've been working extensively doing data analysis in Excel for many years, MySQL on/off for the last year and have recently learnt VBA so that I can automate some of the manual tasks I do at work.

I recently completed the Javascript course on Codeacadamy (which I'd highly recommend) so I'm keen to put that into practise building small apps for Google spreadsheets.

Let's see where this journey takes me.

Ben, February 2014