The advantage of online spreadsheets

AT THE FOSE TRADE SHOW in April, David Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise, wowed the attendees during his keynote speech by demonstrating a few of the advanced features of the spreadsheet in Google Docs, Google’s online office suite. Although the vast majority of spreadsheets still reside safely within an agency’s intranet, he showed how placing spreadsheets online can open a new realm of data management.

Later, we spoke with Jonathan Rochelle, a Google product manager for Docs, who explained in more detail some of the Google Docs’ spreadsheet capabilities. Here are a few he pointed out.

1. PULL LIVE DATA: One advantage to running your spreadsheet on the Web is that you can draw from live and nearly live feeds with a number of predefined functions. For instance, typing “=googlefinance(“ AAPL”)” into a cell will return the current stock price for Apple Computer. Basically, you can load any stock symbol into the function GoogleFinance, and it will draw the latest trading price, within a few minutes. Google also offers other attributes, such as asking for the 52- week high or low, or trading volume. Agencies might not be interested in stock prices, but with a little coding, users can bring in other data, including data encoded in HTML tables, the Extensible Markup Language or Concurrent Versioning System-based files.

2. PULL SEARCH DATA: In some cases, the spreadsheet can even pull non-numeric data from the Web, by using ad hoc attributes called GoogleLookup. For instance, to fill a cell with Abe Lincoln’s birthday, enter in “=googlelookup(“Abraham Lincoln” , “Date of Birth”). His birthday will appear. Left-clicking on the cell will provide a list of Web sites where the data was pulled from.

Rochelle said this feature is somewhat experimental. Google has no set list of attributes — it creates them on the fly, based on commonly used phrases. You have to guess at attributes such as “Date of Birth.” If it is a common enough phrase, the Google search apparatus will create it.