I have been considering which programming/scripting languages to learn for a long time and finally decided to sketch out what exactly I want to accomplish. I know HTML and am not looking to become an IT professional. My hope is to be able to do most of what's below with the fewest, easiest to learn, simplest languages. Any advice?
Category I: Google Drive API for reading and writing to user databases and websites:
• Create a website with user accounts (I’m not compelled to build from scratch)
• Retain and update user account information that I can manually modify.
• Take the user’s input submitted from a website form and use it to update financial and tracking data contained in several different Google Sheets documents.
• At the click of a button, duplicate a Google Drive folder (including contents and permissions) and place it in a new location under a new user-provided folder name.
• Modify a website template so that it shows, or doesn’t show, certain modules based on the access group of a user who is logged in
• Lookup and display specific strings and numbers from a Google Sheets file on an HTML website, locating the source document/tab/cell based on the username who is logged in.
• Write all activity to time-stamped log that could be referenced for auditing site activity. This would track form submissions, login attempts, and IPs linked to an account.
• Interact with data contained in any standardized API, and create a new API.
Category II: Enabling Excel VBA or EXE files to write to Microsoft Office documents:
• Create an executable file that opens in a passable (i.e. non-command line) user interface where the user can type into multiple parts of a form and click on buttons to indicate their choice in a workflow.
• Create and modify an if/then or approvals-based workflow outside of the coding environment so that a non-technical layperson could make changes later.
• Allow the user to change the settings of the program in the executable file itself.
• Import data from specific cells in Excel documents stored in a specified folder by searching the first characters of the file/folder name.
• Duplicate a set of template documents and place them in a new folder under a standardized naming convention, modifying parts of those documents using user inputs.
• Open an email in Outlook populated with language and formatting from a Microsoft Word document, with defined variables replaced by user and database-generated inputs.
• Create a database that automatically updates itself and reports to PDF at a set interval.
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