Digitalizing checklists with Google Apps Script

The main issue with manual checklists is that they are a pain to use. The friction of having to print out a checklist every time that you need to use it is bound to eventually impact the frequency of its use as it provides an unsatisfactory user experience.

If enough users feel that way, then the whole point of the checklist is moot. That is why we should automate these kinds of workflows as early as possible, which will improve compliance with the new workflow by reducing the friction involved in using checklists.

We will have 4 major stages in converting these checklists into forms:

1. Convert the PDFs into a structured representation like JSON or CSV that we can directly use in code

2. Write some Apps Script (Google’s flavor of Javascript) using the Apps Script platform to programmatically create the form.

3. Write some Apps Script to manage some maintenance tasks, like keeping the Google Sheets backend a manageable size.

4. Write an ingest pipeline that uses Apps Script to scan a folder in Google Drive for new checklists and incorporate them to create a new version of the form (using LLMs for processing the PDFs into JSON).