What the messages mean and what to try, from simplest to hardest.
A red message appears when you press the button
A red message means the entry was not saved. Your typing stays in the boxes,
so nothing is lost and you can try again.
Some red messages are asking you for something that is missing:
Message
What to do
“Please fill in all fields”
Type something in Item Name and a number in Quantity
“Please select a quantity type”
Open the Qty Type menu and choose an option
“Please specify the quantity type”
You chose Other — type your wording in the Specify Qty Type box
Any other red message begins with “Not saved” and means the app could not
reach the spreadsheet.
What you do
Check your internet connection by opening any other website.
Press Add to Inventory again.
If it fails again, wait a minute and try once more.
If it keeps failing, write down the exact wording of the red message and the
time it happened, and pass it to whoever looks after the app — or see the
section at the end if that person is you.
The entry seemed to save, but it is not in the spreadsheet
What you do
Check you are looking at the tab named Inventory, not another tab.
Scroll to the very bottom of that tab — new rows are added at the end.
Check nobody has sorted or filtered the tab in a way that hides recent rows.
If the row is genuinely missing and you saw a green message, tell whoever looks
after the app. A green message is only shown when the spreadsheet confirms the
row was added, so a missing row after a green message is worth investigating.
The page will not load, or loads blank
What you do
Check your internet connection by opening any other website.
Reload the page.
Check you are using the correct web address for the app.
If it still will not load, contact whoever looks after the app.
The page needs to fetch a few files from the internet each time it opens. On a
very slow or restricted connection it can take a few seconds, or show an empty
white page if those files cannot be fetched at all. Reloading usually fixes it.
For the person who looks after the app
Causes, roughly in the order worth checking:
The Inventory tab was renamed. The app looks the tab up by name. If it was
renamed, every entry fails with a message naming the tab it could not find.
Rename it back, or have the name changed in the app’s settings.
The columns were reordered. The app writes Item, Qty, Qty Type and
Timestamp by position, not by heading. If the columns were moved, entries keep
saving but land in the wrong places.
The connection to the spreadsheet stopped working. The app reaches the
spreadsheet through a small Google Apps Script attached to it. If that script
was edited, its permission was withdrawn, or it was re-published in a way that
changed its address, entries fail with “Not saved”. Re-publishing it is a job
for whoever maintains the code.
More detail is in the browser. Pressing F12 in most browsers opens a panel
showing the underlying messages, which are useful to pass to a developer.
The technical steps for all of these are in the documents kept with the app’s
source code, not in this guide.