Prompted in part by a presentation I have to give tomorrow as an OU eLearning community session (I hope some folks turn up – the 90 minute session on Mashing Up the PLE – RSS edition is the only reason I’m going in…), and in part by Scott Leslie’s compelling programme for a similar duration … Continue reading “Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets”
Following on from Data Scraping Wikipedia With Google Spreadsheets, here’s a quick post showing how you can use another handy Google spreadsheet formula: =GoogleFinance(“symbol”, “attribute”, “start_date”, “end_date”, “interval”) This function will pull in live – and historical – price data for a stock. Although I noticed this formula yesterday as I was exploring the “importHTML” … Continue reading “Visualising Financial Data In a Google Spreadsheet Motion Chart”
Following on from a the previous posts in which I looked at pulling data tables out of wikipedia into a Google spreadsheet and accessing financial data within Google spreadsheets, in this post I’ll show you some of the things you can do with the Google spreadsheet formula “=GoogleLookup”. If you’ve ever entered a search such … Continue reading “=GoogleLookup: Creating a Google Fact Engine Directory”
It’s all very well when someone like the New York Times opens up an API to campaign finance data (announced here), but only the geeks can play, right? It’s not like they’re making the data available in a spreadsheet so that more people have a chance to try and do something with it, is it? … Continue reading “Viewing Campaign Finance Data In a Google Spreadsheet via the New York Times Campaign Data API”
Late on Friday night, I picked up a challenge (again on Twitter) from Scott Leslie: After a little more probing, the problem turned out to be to do with pulling a list of URLs from a page on the Guardian blog together into a playlist: The 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube. As Scott suggested, … Continue reading “Mashup Reuse – Are You Lazy Enough?”
[UPDATE: Note that since Amazon Product Advertising API, or whatever it’s called now – the thing that was the Amazon E-commerce API – started requiring signed calls (August 2009), this trick has stopped working…] I’ve never really been one for using spreadsheets – I’d rather write code in a text environment than macros and formulae … Continue reading “Calling Amazon Associates/Ecommerce Web Services from a Google Spreadsheet”
A tweet from Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania last week tipped me off to this post from maps evangelist Pamela Fox – Geocoding with Google Spreadsheets (and Gadgets) – in which she demonstrates how to improve the spreadsheets to maps workflow using a Google spreadsheet gadget. I’d actually been thinking about using a mapplet … Continue reading “An Ad Hoc Youtube Playlist Player Gadget, Via Google Spreadsheets”
Some time ago, Paul Walk remarked that “Yahoo Pipes [might] do for web development what the spreadsheet did for non-web development before it (Microsoft Excel has been described as the most widely used Integrated Development Environment)”. After seeing how Google spreadsheets could be used as part of quick online mashup at the recent Mashed Library, … Continue reading “Visual Controls for Spreadsheets”
Just before Christmas, I volunteered to put together a questionnaire for a course on ICT (T209) that would informally and anonymously collect information from students about their mobile phone usage; the idea being that we could run similar surveys in the follow on course (T215 Communication and information technologies) in future years and give a … Continue reading “Creating Your Own Results Charts for Surveys Created with Google Forms”
Digging around looking for stats and data relating to the first Formula One Grand Prix of the new season, I came across some interesting looking technical info on the Race Car Engineering website (Formula 1 2009: Round 1 Australia tech data), as well as details of the staring weighs of the vehicles following qualification (post-qualifying … Continue reading “F1 Pit Stop Strategist – Fuel Stop Spreadsheet”
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