Spotlight on Developers: Gadgets to Visualize Data in New Ways

Continuing our Spotlight on Developers series, we present a few gadgets that give you new and exciting ways to visualize your data.

Our spreadsheet gadgets API is all about giving developers the power to extend the functionality of Google Docs spreadsheets. The following four spreadsheet gadgets display information in unique ways.

1. Tree Map Gadget (By Yaar Schnitman, former Technology Program Manager intern) - A color-coded area diagram that helps you understand complicated hierarchical data at a glance. Required columns: one or more text columns describing a hierarchy of items, and a single numeric column describing the weight of each item. Optional: supply one additional numeric column to create a heat map. Check out this visualization of the 2008 U.S. budget.

2. Advanced Word Cloud Gadget (by Seth Glickman, former Web Development Intern) - Word clouds are a great way to visualize the popularity of words from large amounts of text, say for example a feedback form, where the more often used words appear in a larger font. With this advanced world cloud gadget, you can customize your word cloud by choosing the color, excluding words of your choosing (like "or" and "the"), and best of all, turn each tag into a link with an easy-to-use search string. Check out a word cloud for Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

3. Spider Chart Gadget (by Greg Marra, former Software Engineering Intern) - With spider charts you can visually compare the values of multiple attributes. In this example, the handling, acceleration, top speed, firepower and armor of a race car is compared to a tank.

4. QR Code Gadget (by Greg Schechter, former Software Engineering Intern) - Use this gadget to quickly encode data into the QR code format from a Google Docs spreadsheet so that it can be scanned and read by mobile devices that have a QR code reader. An easy way to send web addresses, phone numbers and notes. Try out the QR code gadget.

There are two ways to get started using these gadgets. First, you can use the templates above since they already have the gadget inserted within the spreadsheet. Or you can add these gadgets to your own spreadsheet by creating a new spreadsheet and using Insert > Gadgets. There you can check out all of the gadgets that are available.

Posted by: Ronald Ho, Product Manager, Google Docs

Spotlight on Developers: Spreadsheet Mapper

This next post in our Spotlight on Developers series highlights a gadget that combines spreadsheets and the My Map feature in Google Maps. In addition to using it while househunting like our guest author did, you might even find it useful to plot out points of interest for a vacation or a road trip this summer. :)

Last year, I was looking to move into a new apartment. Using a spreadsheet in Google Docs was a convenient way to list the apartments I was interested in, and creating a My Map in Google Maps was a great way to plot their locations. But, I wished there was a way to see both the map and spreadsheet at the same time. Some tools already existed to convert spreadsheets into KML, but these don't work well when you're updating a spreadsheet on a daily basis.

Thus the Spreadsheet Mapper gadget was born. The idea is simple: within a spreadsheet, generate a map based on address information in any column. This allowed me to quickly list the apartments I was interested in, while seeing how far they were from work.

Developing the gadget was easy. I was already familiar with programming a Google Gadget, and it was wasn't difficult to use the extensions that pull spreadsheet data into the gadget.

Try it out using this template or insert it in your own spreadsheet using Insert > Gadget.



Or add the gadget to your own spreadsheet with these instructions: http://spreadsheets2kml.appspot.com/help

Posted by: Alec Go, AdWords Sales Engineer (and spreadsheet fan)

Update: Replaced the link to the published spreadsheet with a link to a template.

Spotlight on Developers: Educational Spreadsheet Gadgets

As we gear up for Google I/O, our annual developer conference, we'll be presenting a series of posts highlighting some of the gadgets and applications that have been built by developers using our APIs. Today, we'll start with a few gadgets that might be useful for educators, students, and maybe word-lovers, too.

Spreadsheet gadgets allow you to display spreadsheet data in new and interesting ways. Using our spreadsheet gadgets API and the spreadsheet Data APIs, outside developers and other Google teams have been able to add new features into spreadsheets and publish these gadgets to iGoogle, blogs and other platforms. Some older, but popular examples include a Gantt Chart by Viewpath and the Analytics for Google Docs spreadsheets by Panorama.

For this first post in the Spotlight on Developer series, I wanted to show off a few new gadgets that teachers and students might find useful -- for studying for a Spanish exam or learning new vocabulary by playing fun word games.

1. Flash Cards (by Seth Glickman, previous Web Development Intern) - Easily create flashcard sets. HTML is allowed. Ideal for foreign language vocabulary sets, AP Chemistry common ions... anything you'd use flashcards for. Remove cards from view once you know them well enough, shuffle the remaining cards, change languages and more. Try this out.




2. Word Study (by Pamela Fox, Engineer) - Create interactive word games. You can guess using word jumbles, type-ins, or multiple choice, and you can choose to have the hints come from Google Image Search, Google Translate, Wikipedia, or your own spreadsheet. Try this out.




3. Word Search (by Pamela Fox, Engineer) - Create an interactive word search from a column of words in a spreadsheet, with a user-specified number of rows or columns. Try this out.



There are two ways to get started using these gadgets. First, you can use the templates above since they already have the gadget inserted within the spreadsheet. Or you can add these gadgets to your own spreadsheet by creating a new spreadsheet and using Insert > Gadgets. There you can check out all of the gadgets available.



Posted by: Ronald Ho, Product Manager, Google Docs

Teachers: How do you use Google Sites?

Last year, teachers shared examples of how they're using Google Docs in the classroom, and we listed these ideas on a Docs for Teachers page. While reviewing all of these teachers' ideas, I noticed that many teachers used Google Sites as a central website for their classes and class projects. Students and teachers also often created pages within their websites that include embedded documents created in Google Docs.

This got me thinking... why don't we create a page to display educational uses of Sites like we did for Docs? If you're a K-12 teacher using Google Sites and are willing to share your examples, check out this request for projects on the Google Apps blog.

Posted by: Ashley Chandler, Docs User Operations

Create groups of contacts to make sharing faster

People who regularly work in teams should check out the recently released standalone contact manager: http://www.google.com/contacts. It lets you manage your contacts and put them into groups.

When you share a document in Google Docs, just click Choose from Contacts to pick one of these groups. There's no need to enter your collaborators' email addresses individually. The groups you create or modify while using Google Docs are stored in the contact manager and can be used across other services like Google Calendar, Picasa Web Albums, and Gmail.

To learn more about the contact manager (and to find out how to use it within your organization) read this Google Apps blog post.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager