Move Spreadsheet Bot to a New Home
If you’re here, you may have heard of our Spreadsheet Bot before! We’ve enjoyed seeing all of your Spreadsheet Bot creations, and we’re really excited to show off our new platform that makes it just as easy for you to write even more powerful bots. Learn how to migrate existing Spreadsheet Bots below or start from scratch here!
A year ago, we helped John Borthwick quickly setup his own personal chatbot, Botwick, in just a few simple steps with our popular Spreadsheet Bot app, a super-simple way to build chatbots off of a Google spreadsheet.
Since then, Dexter has evolved into a platform focused on easily creating and managing chatbots across multiple messaging platforms. In part through Spreadsheet Bot, we’ve learned several important lessons on what makes for a great chatbot creation and end-user experience. That’s what makes us so excited to launch our new platform with all the tools you’ll need to write, launch, and manage a successful bot.
In this post, we’ll be covering how to migrate existing Spreadsheet Bots to the new platform. Then, in the next two posts, we describe how John was able to create the new Botwick v2.0 using the Dexter platform.
But if you’re antsy to get started building your own bot from scratch —and we certainly don’t blame you — sign up for our platform and follow along with our Quickstart tutorial. We can’t wait to see what you create!
This is part one of a three-part series for fans of our Spreadsheet Bot, who may be interested in learning how to:
- (You’re here!) Part One: Move Spreadsheet Bot to a New Home
- Part Two: Bring Life to a New Dexter Bot
- Part Three: Give your Dexter Bot Superpowers
Spreadsheet Bot, It’s Been Real
Alas, it’s time for us to say goodbye to our Spreadsheet Bot app! Dexter will be officially decommissioning the existing Spreadsheet Bot app in the very near future…
But if you’re truly in love with a Spreadsheet Bot that you have live and you want to make sure it continues working in the future, we’ve made it incredibly easy for your old Spreadsheet Bots to join us on our new platform.
Let’s Get Started
The process for migrating an existing Spreadsheet Bot yourself onto the new Dexter will only take… you guessed it, a few simple steps. We’ll demonstrate with the help of Botwick:
- Signup and create a new bot on Dexter:
2. In the Google spreadsheet for your original Spreadsheet Bot, find the google script url within the Script Editor:
- Click Tools > Script editor…
- In the new window that appears, click Publish > Deploy as web app and copy the script url for use in the next step.
3. In the bot editor of the newly-created bot, replace the existing text with the following snippet:
+ *
- ^spreadsheetBot(PASTE_THAT_SCRIPT_URL_HERE, <star>)
4. Set up your configurations for any platforms you want the new bot to live on, by following the step-by-step instructions on the Platforms tab of your bot editor.
P.S. Don’t be afraid to overwrite any existing configuration values on external Twilio, Facebook, Slack platform pages from your previous Spreadsheet Bots— you won’t need them anymore!
5. Publish!
There we have it! It’s as simple as that to bring your Spreadsheet Bot over. Try messaging the number or platform username, your new Dexter bot should be responding much faster!
Write Once, Deploy Everywhere
One immediate advantage of joining our new platform with your spreadsheet bot is the ability to deploy the same content you’ve written immediately to every messaging platform that has been deployed with valid credentials.
If you venture over to the Platforms page here, you can see all of the different providers we support — Facebook, SMS, Slack, and Twitter — with more coming soon! Let us know at info@rundexter.com if there’s a specific platform you’d like to see.
Troubleshooting
If you do end up running across any problems, consider the following:
- Within the Tools > Script editor… of your Google spreadsheet, do you have the following methods in httpMethods.gs and Code.gs?
- Within the Tools > Script editor… of your Google spreadsheet, do you have “SheetConverter” under Included Libraries?
- When you click Publish > Deploy as web app…, do you have “Who has access to the app” toggled to “Anyone, even anonymous”?
Starting from Scratch
Wow, that’s great! … But, let’s say you wanted to build a bot similar to Spreadsheet Bot and you don’t have an existing Spreadsheet Bot on hand!? No worries, we can easily recreate Botwick’s charming personality from scratch in a brand-new bot created entirely on Dexter.
