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Inspiring Idea #2

Contents

  1. 1 Introduction
  2. 2 GoogleLookup
  3. 3 Magic Fill
  4. 4 Import formulas
  5. 5 GoogleFinance
  6. 6 Spreadsheet Gadgets

Introduction

Google spreadsheets are incredibly exciting.  On the surface you see a grid interface letting you enter numbers and formulas.  But under the hood there's lots of exciting features!  Here's just a few:

GoogleLookup

Ever wonder what the population of California is?  Or the ERA for Roger Clemens was?  With =GoogleLookup("california","population") or =GoogleLookup("Roger Clemens", "earned run average") will get you those answers.  See here for more info.

Magic Fill

You've got two or three related items, how do you get more?  With our Magic Fill feature, highlight the two or three cells, hold down Ctrl (in a PC) or Option (in a Mac) and click the grabber and drag down, wait as the we use Google Sets to fill in the cells!  See here for more info.  "Strawberries", "bananas", "peaches"... think quick! 20 more fruits!

Import formulas

If you see a table you like from wikipedia, just import it!  Data from another Google spreadsheet, just import it!  XML, csv file, HTML? Just import it with these simple formulas. See here for more info.  What's the population breakdown of India by its 20+ dialects?  Try =ImportHtml("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_demographics","table",5) in Google spreadsheets!

GoogleFinance

Stock prices, volume, PE ratios, the google finance function lets you get it all and have it all live update as well.  See here for more info.

Spreadsheet Gadgets

With gadgets in spreadsheet, this is a great way to have users grab data from the spreadsheet and you can conduct your analysis.  You can see here for more information on creating gadgets and see here for a sample gadget.  The pivot table gadget enables users to specify the data and from there it conducts the analysis and displays the results in the gadget.  Remember Ola Rosling's incredible TED talk?  You can play with that very visualization at gapminder.org.  Now use that visualization for your own data using this sample template here.  Get more gadgets from Insert-->Gadget.