I’m currently managing 7 Google Docs files, and each one has its own Google Apps Script attached to it. All these scripts do basically the same thing - they find specific words and replace them with other words. The code is almost identical across all documents.
Can I combine all these separate scripts into one main project that works with all 7 documents? I think this would be better because:
- We won’t get permission prompts from Google every time we run the script on different docs
- Making changes to the code would be much easier since I only need to update it in one place
- Running the script across multiple documents would be faster and more efficient
I’m wondering if there might be any issues when merging them together, but since the script is fairly basic, I don’t think there should be major problems. Has anyone done something similar before?
I merged about 15 similar document scripts into one project six months ago - totally worth it. The key is setting up your document references right from the start. Create an array with all your document IDs and loop through them. Performance boost was huge since you’re not running multiple scripts, and unified authorization saves a ton of time. One thing that bit me: some documents had slightly different structures or formatting, so build in flexibility for edge cases. Maintenance is way easier now - I update code in one place instead of fifteen.
yeah, totally doable! just create a standalone script project and use openById() to target each doc. i’ve done this before and it works great - no more annoying auth popups and way easier to maintain. only thing is make sure your script has proper permissions for all docs first.
Definitely the right approach. I consolidated about 12 similar scripts last year and saw huge efficiency gains. Watch out for error handling though - one bad document can crash your entire batch when you’re processing multiple files. I’d wrap each document operation in try-catch blocks so failures don’t bring down everything else. Also throw in some basic logging to track what processed successfully. The permission consolidation alone makes it worthwhile, plus debugging gets way simpler when everything runs from one spot.