[georgeaf99]

A friend who works at the Dallas Animal Shelter (a non-profit) asked me to help automate their process of generating reports from data gathered via Google Forms, which they were doing by hand every month... As a developer who is used to high technical investment into complex systems, I had to take a completely different approach to storing their information.

Google Forms + Spreadsheet + Python works perfectly for use cases like this: it is free, scaling isn't a concern, users can view and modify data at any time, and users can create Google Forms at any time. If you are trying to help a non-profit and aren't planning on maintaining their systems long-term, this is a great approach.

Code for the project: https://github.com/georgeaf99/das-care-contact-forms

[neeljpatel]

Need to dump a SQL query into a spreadsheet? That's what I made the script below for. Runs now on a cron job and now I have a makeshift analytics platform :)

http://pastebin.com/ACwqc5um

[fragmede]

Really curious in the "low" technical investment answer: where/how does the Python end of this system get run?

[jotux]

>which they were doing by hand every month

I would assume they just installed python on whatever machine they were originally using to hand-generate reports and the job of that person now is to just run the python script and wait for it to finish.

[tyingq]

Google's AppEngine would likely be free or extremely low cost in this situation. Gspread appears to work there fine: https://github.com/burnash/gspread/issues/39