How to Set Expiration Dates for Shared Google Drive Files

When you share any file or folder in Google Drive with another user, the shared links will work forever unless you manually change the sharing permissions. For instance, if you have shared a document with an external vendor, they’ll continue to have access to the file long after your business contract may have ended.

In such a situation, wouldn’t it be nice if you could set expiration dates while sharing files in Google Drive? For instance, share a document temporarily for, say, 10 days and access to the file should be revoked automatically after that period has passed.

Add an Auto-Expiry Date for Shared Links in Google Drive

Google Drive does let you set expiration dates for shared links but this option is only available to paid Google App for Work accounts.

Well, no worries. If you have a free Google account, you can still create temporary links that auto-expire after a certain time. Here’s a step by step guide:

1. Go to labnol.org/expire and authorize the web app to access your Google Drive.
2. Open the File Picker and select any file or folder in your Google Drive that you would like share.
3. Enter one or more email addresses (comma separated) of users who should be given viewer (read-only) or editor (read & write) access to your file.
4. Finally, specify the time period after which the access should be limited. You can say 5 hours or 3 weeks or even 2 years.

Click the “Set Expiration” button and you are done. The Google Script will set a time-based trigger that will automatically remove the specified user from the access list after the specified date and time.

You can also use the Google Drive Auditor add-on to analyze the shared permissions of every file in your Google Drive and know who can see your files.

The auto-expiry app will list all the files and folders that are set to expire after a certain period. You can click the “cancel” link against any Drive link to prevent that shared link from expiring automatically.

Also see: Make a Google Drive Tree (video)

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The story, How to Set Expiration Dates for Shared Google Drive Files, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 08/08/2016 under Google Drive, Internet.

How to Make Pixel Paintings with Google Spreadsheets

You may have been using Google Spreadsheets for budgeting and project management but did you know that the same sheets application can also help you create impressive pixel paintings in minutes? The Google blog recently published a story of two illustrators who created a bright and beautiful wall mural using Google Spreadsheets.

Marina and Mallory connected on Google Hangouts to plan and sketch out ideas, and creatively “hack” Sheets in order to make art: resizing cells into thousands of pixel-like squares, merging cells to create color blocks, creating vibrant color gradients with conditional formatting and cell values, and other cool things we had no idea you could do with Sheets.

The idea is simple. Each cell in the spreadsheet corresponds to a pixel in the painting. You compute the color of the pixel and make it the background color of the corresponding cell. Now resize the spreadsheet cells in small perfect squares and your spreadsheet will look exactly like the original artwork.

How to Paint with Google Spreadsheets

If you would like to create your own spreadsheet art but don’t have the time to carefully paint every cell manually, here’s a simple workaround for you. You can take any photograph, vector art, or any other image and use a Google Script to convert that bitmap image into spreadsheet art.

Watch the video tutorial  or open this Google Sheet for sample artwork.

Create Pixel Art with Google Sheets

It takes few easy steps to make pixel art with Google Sheets. You can use any free image but make sure they are 300 pixels or less for optimal performance.

1. Open the Google Spreadsheet template and copy it to your own Google Drive.
2. Go to the Spreadsheet Art menu, choose the Image Upload option and select the picture that you’ve downloaded in the previous step.
3. The sheet will now parse every single pixel of your image and write the corresponding hex color codes in the spreadsheets cells.
4. Select the “Apply Colors” option and the Google Script will set the background color of every spreadsheet cell equal to the cell value.
5. The cells in the spreadsheet are rectangles whereas pixels are perfect squares. Select step 3 to resize every cell in the spreadsheet as a square.

And that’s it. Your spreadsheet art is now ready.

The end result may appear slightly pixelated (video) because we have used a small image as the source template but impressive nonetheless. You can download the Google Sheet as a PDF file or save it in Microsoft Excel format.

Pixel Paintings made with Google Spreadsheets – Link

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The story, How to Make Pixel Paintings with Google Spreadsheets, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 08/08/2016 under Google Docs, Software.