Hey everyone! I need help with automating our scheduling process. Right now I have all our staff schedules organized in a spreadsheet, but I want each person to automatically get their shifts added to their personal calendar.
The spreadsheet layout shows each employee’s name in rows, with their 2-week schedule going across columns. Different letters represent different shift types (like A for morning, B for evening, etc.) and dates are shown at the top of each column.
I’m thinking Google Apps Script might be the solution here, but I’m not really a coder so I don’t know where to start. Is it even possible to automatically create calendar events for specific people based on spreadsheet data? Each employee would have their own email address that I could use.
Any guidance would be amazing! Thanks in advance.
definitely doable! i’d check out zapier or microsoft power automate before coding anything yourself. both connect google sheets to google calendar without scripts - just set triggers for cell changes and map employee emails to their calendars. way easier than apps script.
I built something like this at my last job - Google Apps Script works great for it. The hardest part isn’t making the calendars, it’s parsing your spreadsheet data properly. You’ll need to map those shift letters to actual times somehow - either hardcode them in the script or create a reference table. Watch out for permissions though. Each employee has to grant calendar access, or you need domain admin rights if you’re on Workspace. Also figure out how you’ll handle schedule changes without creating duplicate events. I added unique IDs to each calendar event so the script could find and update existing ones instead of just dumping new events every time.
Used Apps Script for this exact thing last year. The big issue everyone’s missing is timezones - you’ll get events at wrong times if you don’t handle daylight saving properly. I made a separate sheet tab with shift codes and start/end times, then used VLOOKUP in the script. Watch out for Google’s daily execution limits though. With lots of employees, the script will timeout. I split mine into batches of 20 and set up multiple triggers. Also add error logging so you can see which employees had calendar update issues.