Free User Dashboard Login & Signup Starter – Apps Script

FREE036 is the first part of a user dashboard build, and what it delivers is the layer everything else sits on: the login form, the sign up form, and the record of who came in and when. The dashboard screens themselves — settings, news, contact — arrive in the later parts of the series, so take this as the foundation rather than a finished portal.

Accounts that you switch on

Users live as rows in a Google Sheet: a type, a user ID, a name and a code. One column decides everything — set it to yes and that person can log in, set it to no and they cannot, with no account deleted and nothing else to change. An attempt with the wrong details, or from a switched-off account, is met with a clear not logged in message rather than a blank screen.

Knowing who is actually using it

The part that makes this worth building on is the activity side. The sheet records who signed in and when they were active, and captures the location the login came from. If you are running something for a hundred users, being able to see who is actually on it, from where, without asking anyone, is usually the first thing you wish you had.

Where it is heading

The full system this starts is a dashboard for a school, an institution or a shop, with users able to change their own password rather than messaging you for a reset. Those pages come in the following parts of the series. In this part, the dashboard area is a shell that loads after login.

Setting it up

Build the sheet with the user columns, open Apps Script from Extensions and paste in the supplied code and HTML files, then deploy as a web app.