Make a Tour of the Sheet

0:00 This is a video for a special kind of person. Maybe you are 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 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 wanna explain to someone very quickly what it is without a video. Meaning they actually are in the sheet doing this. So this is a tour of the sheet. This is. Take a tour. It's an app script . I'll show you how I built it, but we just click it and I'll show you how it runs. This is the start of tour. You see we are on the start tab. Click okay. This is the second tab and notice we're on the second tab. And the first tab has hidden .

0:45 Click. Okay. Now we're on the third tab and say this is the third tab. So we can write this text, we can edit this text as much as we want. Click okay. And the user is going through each of these tabs, seeing the tab and seeing a little message of what is going on there. The tour is complete. Okay. And I can also click and unhide all those sheets that I hid. They're, they're all unhidden. Go to extensions app script and I'll show you how this is done. The app script is fairly straightforward. We are using a function on open here. This is a custom menu that we created just using spreadsheet app, ui, create menu, add our text, tour this sheet, add in an item, take the tour, and running the function tour. So here's our function tour and in succession, we're doing a few steps.

1:34 Over and over again. One, we're activating the sheet that we want, so we're just using spreadsheet app. active spreadsheet dot sheet by name, then dot Activate, and then we're flushing. Why this is important is because Flush essentially says everything above this, do that. So app scripts a lot of times will run the entire app script and then execute, for the user but this flush says, Hey, just do everything above. So we're gonna just activate that sheet. Then we're gonna get an alert. And the alert is cool because we can. Edit this text. We can add a bit of text. It's in the center. We can write a lot. I recommend not writing too much because the whole app script has to be done within a couple minutes or time out. So you just want a little bit of like, Hey, this is what this does.

2:20 This is why it's important. And then the final step of this tour is that we are gonna hide the sheet. 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. It just needs to be hidden away as they work on the sheet in general. And then the next step is we're gonna do all of that again, but for the second tab. And so we write second tab, activate, flush, alert, and then hide sheet . We do this for each and every one. And then at the very end we get an alert. This tour is complete and you can have the last thing you wanna say to someone. The unhide is fairly simple. It's just a four each on all of the sheets. Show the sheet. All the sheets have been unhidden.

3:05 That makes it the whole thing easy to see all of the sheets. You can even run this unhide at the very end once the tour is complete. Oh, click okay. And it unhides all of the sheets. 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 and then unhide at the end if you wish, I hope you enjoyed making a tour of your tabs and this app script . If you're a member and watching this on Better sheets.co right now, you can get this sheet and this app script down below directly. Copy it to your drive.