Make a Tour of Your Sheet

<div>0:00 This is a video for a special kind of person. Maybe you're sharing a sheet with people who need to go through your tabs in a very specific order, or they need to know about your tabs when they, uh, are looking at your sheet. 0:13 Or you're selling a sheet, and you're like, hey, I want to show off what each of these tabs do, and I just want to explain to someone very quickly what it is without a video. 0:23 Meaning they actually see that you are in the sheet doing this. So this is a tour of the sheet. This is Take a Tour. 0:30 It's an Apps Script .

I'll show you how I built it, but we just click it, and I'll show you how it runs. 0:35 This is the Start a Tour. You see, we're on the Start tab. Click OK. This is the second tab, and notice we're on the second tab, and the first tab has Hidden . 0:48 Thank you very much for watching. So, this is done. The Apps Script is fairly straight forward. 1:20 We are using a function onOpen here.

This is a custom menu that we created just using SpreadsheetApp .getUi, createMenu, added our text, tore the sheet, added an item, take the tor, and running the function tor. 1:35 So here's our phone function tor. And in succession, we're doing a few steps over and over again. One, we're activating the sheet that we want. 1:46 So we're just using SpreadsheetApp .getActiveSpreadsheet.getSheetByName, then .activate. And then we're flushing. Why this is important is because flush essentially says everything above this, do that. 1:58 So Apps Script .

A lot of times, we'll run the entire Apps Script and then execute, uh, for the user what they see and what ends up happening. 2:10 But this flush says, hey, just do everything above. So we're gonna just activate that sheet. Then we're gonna get an alert. 2:16 And the alert is cool because we can edit this text, we can add a bit of text. It's in the center. 2:21 A toast is that message in the bottom right that pops up a little bit. And it doesn't have as much space as this alert. 2:26 We can write a lot.

I recommend not writing too much because Apps Scripts in general, the whole Apps Script has to be done within a couple minutes or time out. 2:36 So you just want a little bit of, like, hey, this is what this does. This is why it's important. And then the final step of this tour is that we're gonna hide the sheet. 2:44 Now, this is not necessary, but I thought it was really nice.

To do this so that as the sheet goes, we're gonna hide some of those sheets that may not be needed for the user if you're doing this as selling a sheet or you're doing this for someone who needs to know what the sheet does, but it just needs 3:03 to be hidden away as they work on the sheet in general. Again, this is for many tabs. And then the next step is we're gonna do all of that again, but for the second time. 3:13 Tab. And so we write, second tab, activate, flush, alert, and then hide sheet .

Again, the hide sheet is not necessary for this, but I thought it was fun. 3:22 And we do this for each and every one. And then at the very end, we get an alert. This tour is complete. 3:27 And you're gonna have the last thing you want to say to someone. The unhide is fairly simple. It's just a for each. 3:33 On all of the sheets, show the sheet. All the sheets have been unhidden. That makes it the whole thing easy to see all of the sheets. 3:40 You can even run this unhide at the very end.

Once the tour is complete, I'll click OK, and it unhides all of the sheets. 3:48 So we can just write that with unhide and be done. There. So as it goes through, it's hiding all of the tabs as we're going through the tour. 3:56 And unhide at the end, if you wish. Or we don't need to include that. But yeah, enjoy. I hope you enjoyed making a tour of your tabs and this Apps Script . 4:07 If you're a member and watching this on bettersheets.co right now, you can get this sheet and this Apps Script down below. 4:14 Directly copy it to your drive.</div>