Google Spruces up Spreadsheets
Trying to remove the need for anyone to run traditional applications, Google has tacked on a cool new feature to their Google Docs offering. The Visualization API lets developers create and share their own charts, graphs, animations and whatnot that draw data from Google Spreadsheets.
The second part of the announcement, the part that affects end-users, is that these gadgets can be embedded in a Google Spreadsheet or published on iGoogle. I couldn’t make mine publish anywhere beyond that — clicking the “Publish Gadget” menu option did nothing at all — which makes it much less useful, but the mere presence of the option is very comforting.
The two dozen or so pre-existing gadgets include:
- Organization Chart … expects two columns: the first for employee name and the second for manager name.
- Panorama Pivot Table for Google spreadsheets … an interactive table that automatically extracts, organizes, and summarizes your data
- FusionCharts Pie & Donut Widget from InfoSoft Global (P) Ltd.
and the tasty-sounding
I still prefer the somewhat less flashy EditGrid for my own online spreadsheeting needs. The main reason is that trying to set up a collaborative spreadsheet on Google was a miserable wrangle in which everyone needed to get a Gmail account, while EditGrid lets you use your own comfy login of choice. But there’s a pleasant sleekness to EditGrid: it does everything I want it to and not terribly much more. It has graph widgets that you can publish on a third-party web page too, incidentally.
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