The Two T’s: Turn Templates into Tools

<div>0:00 Here are two techniques to turn templates into tools. So first off, let me explain the two T's, which is templates and tools. 0:07 Essentially, everything you see that is a Google Sheet for sale essentially is a template .

Even databases, checklist planners , trackers , they're all essentially templates. 0:16 It's a design sheet it is something that you then copy and download to your Google Drive and then you enter data into it perhaps databases may be different But there is another type of spreadsheet that I think could sell way way better and way more sophisticated but it doesn't have to be really terrible 0:42 to build I think you can even turn templates into tools and these tools could essentially be a software in a spreadsheet that you make yes you whats really cool is im gonna show you at least two little techniques here that I think immediately will turn a template into a tool and im gonna do it in this 1:07 exact sheet that will be available down below to anyone taking this course on better sheets or on udemy so first off is a custom menu this is really cool because it will open automatically a google sheet even when someone copies it and puts it in their google drive so all we're gonna do is go up to extensions 1:26 app script you're gonna end up seeing just like my function when you first go there it'll be not essentially blank but it says my function and next were gonna go over to custom menu you can google this google sheets custom menu this will be the first thing developers dot google dot com slash app script 1:45 guides venues all that stuff here all we need is this function on open Ive never memorized this Ive used this for years ive never memorized it ive just copy and pasted from googles own documentation so im gonna delete everything in here and paste this on open what this is is just a little bit of a function 2:07 called on open its a automatic simple trigger that you dont have to do anything other than literally type this on open and its going to create a menu it will create it right here next to help and it will be called custom menu im gonna rename this tool menu so you see what that is tool menu but were gonna 2:28 rename it again so i show you this the first item here or add item this is a function this menu item 1 is a function that you create but you can call this anything you want you can call this picker and this first term this first item is what it shows to the user so were gonna call this pick first item 2:53 you can also create sub menus im gonna delete all of these separator and sub menus for now and only have one item okay im gonna hit command s or we can click this save project the very first time you do it it takes a few moments to do now we save it but if we go back to our sheet it doesnt show it so 3:09 lets refresh our sheet we saved it we refreshed our sheet and now right next to help in a few moments theres tool menu and here we go pick first item when i click it nothing is gonna happen in fact its gonna have some kind of error because we havent created a script yet but i wanted to show you this  3:25 because it is very very simple to add this really cool custom menu we can also edit this and derive any kind of functions we can do ai calls to this we can do also like an infinite number of stuff but lemme show you another way so thats one way to initiate any kind of scripts that you write but i wanna 3:46 show you one other way you can do functions function uhh lets uhh im gonna call this lets capitalize and its gonna take some input text actually we are gonna call this text and its just gonna cap like upper everything so we are gonna take variable result equals text umm i think we need to do dot i always 4:14 forget this but its basically javascript uppercase is just gonna be to uppercase to actually i think we need we can do this variable text equals text text dot to uppercase i think we're going to do that and then we're going to do return result and we're now if we go let's i'll save this let's test this 4:43 out we're going to capitalize let's capitalize d2 and there it is it is capitalizing uppercasing so any kind of javascript functions we can use here very simply just to transform stuff but you saw like i had to know this lets capitalize i had to write it here and i had to know that it was We'll next  5:06 week.

Available but you can create like a some kind of name for your tool right and lets say this is a text editor kind of tool and so we are going to rename this function text editor and then we are going to underscore capitalize and so what you can do is essentially sell this set of functions in a  5:35 google sheet that now people can use when they buy your google sheet they then copy it and then now they can use this and again we can we now have a new name for this so we'll we're gonna go back grab our name and put it here and it will work right it will have we can work all types of stuff but like 5:53 that's hard to remember right even if somebody buys it, watches a video, reads your instructions and then like okay has to always remember that this text editor has this function capitalized but we can create a custom function that acts just like a native function so we're going to use these not quotes 6:15 but comments so slash star star you just have to do and in here we're going to do at custom function that is all we have to do save that and now the only thing that people need to remember is like this first part this text editor capitalized they don't have to remember capitalized they don't have to  6:38 remember anything else they were like hey i bought this sheet i have these new text editing capabilities and so mentally all this and if we do equals text editor there it is text editor capitalized we can actually text editor capitalized save that and now we do text editor capitalized so I can use the 7:07 exact same function with less energy to remember exactly the function name I'm like oh wait that's a text editing function that I added here and now we can even add more functions all we have to do is add that custom function so I think these are really two very simple techniques copy paste the on open 7:29 menu to have a sort of gluey system right a graphic graphical user interface let's call this lower and we can rename this to lowercase and so you make save so now we have two functions I'll show you what that looks like equals text editor there we go text editor lower text editor capitalized this has 7:56 now super powered our sheet right and we're just doing it with the on open function to give us a menu here so someone can click if they generally want to like create something duplicate it really easily do some function just one click go up here but if you're doing something inside of a spreadsheet cells 8:15 and you're like oh i want to name this and brand it under my own and make it easier for you use this custom function i think these two things are going to help you create tools out of templates I hope this is super helpful. 8:31 In the next video, I'm gonna talk about trackers.

I'm gonna show you four different trackers I've created and why. You may want to choose one or the other or just give you some more inspiration on different things you can create</div>