The title doesn’t mean that a spreadsheet can be world wide, but can be a powerful www contributor. Believe it or not, I’ve just constructed a stock watch list in a spreadsheet in 2 hours.
I’m a great fan of Microsoft Excel and have used it effectively for many of my projects. It allows you to manage large data effectively. You can do calculations, define formulas, conditional formatting, lookup in the sheet and even you can create interactive forms out of excel. It also has a nice feature, by which you can import XML data from web and map it to a range of cells. Data becomes dynamic in this case.
Well, if Google is coming to this market then there must be lot of unexplored opportunities in this field. It is actually, and having worked on a Google spreadsheet for sometime, I’ve realized its potential. It allows you to import XML, HTML and CSV data from external sources into the spreadsheet. There are functions like importHTML, importXML and importData that help you to do so. Interesting one is the importHTML function. Use this function to import a table from a web page and use the CONTINUE function to refer to a particular cell in the imported table. ImportHTML needs the URL and the index of the table in the HTML page. CONTINUE function takes the address of the cell, which has the importHTML command, the row number and the column number of the table cell to be referred.
For example, ImportHtml(“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India”, “table”,4) imports the demographic information for the population of India from a wiki page.
For more info on the above said functions visit this help page.
Here is a small example to illustrate the potential of Google Spreadsheets. This sheet imports data from ICICIDirect.com. I’ve created sheets for Indices, NSE & BSE exchanges and watchlist. First three are open to public as no input is needed for them. Watchlist, the last one is for my personal use where I can add quotes of my favorite stocks to track them.
View this spreadsheet in a new window.
If you never seen a Google spreadsheet I would strongly advice you to visit and have a glance of it.
Update: Added a worksheet named “GET STOCK CODE” for finding stock codes against company names.
