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.