In October we started partnering with out California news organizations to gather COVID data. But the change meant our previous system to process and publish COVID data would not work.

An image of Google Apps Script code.

I rewrote a Google Apps script to parse data from Google Sheets and publish it as a json on our S3 for our front end to access. Our reporters also wanted to look at the data aggregated in a few ways, like the daily new cases for each county. So I created several tabs that crunch the numbers for them as the data is updated.

An image showing Google Apps Scripts code.

Now, whoever updates the spreadsheet can push a button, and it publishes on our s3, automatically updating our COVID tracker. It uses Apps Script libraries to protect the credentials from spreadsheet users.