Sharing Docs

Kortina from bit.ly posted this spreadsheet which is actually a tool tied back to his URL shortening service. This is a good use of the ImportData() function within Google spreadsheets... it allows entry of lots of original (long) URLs, then creates a call to the bit.ly service (which, itself is a simple URL), then uses the importdata() function to get back the answer (the shortened URL)... Try this to learn a few new tricks.

Site:	bit.ly blog
Page/Post:	bit.ly meets Google spreadsheets
Spreadsheet:	bit.ly shortener spreadsheet
	Get Your Own Copy

Here's a really well constructed music list spreadsheet which contains song ratings with links back to the source of each rating, as well as Times (and totalled), Artist, song title and Album (is that still a term?). For those of you who love to make and share song lists - here's a good model...

Site:	Aftermath (blog)
Page/Post:	Leonard Cohen: You Know Who I Am
Spreadsheet:	Zen Vision M Tracks (Song List and Ratings)

Teresa Payne-Neal came up with a novel use of spreadsheets as a way to share a craft template with the readers of her scrapbooking and card-making blog called My Life's Art. You may scroll up and down this post a few times before recognizing the spreadsheet.

Site:	My Life's Art Blog
Page/Post:	3 x 3 Treat Box
Spreadsheet:	Treat Box Template (3x3)

An interesting idea here from Mile High Buzz for the use of Forms and Spreadsheets in Google Docs - gathering key information about local shops... Coffee shops in the Denver area in this case... A form is used to allow people to put data into this spreadsheet and then the spreadsheet is published so anyone can see it. This is a great sample that can be created from scratch in about 5 minutes. (Click here to create your own form now)

Site:	Mile High Buzz
Page/Post:	Coffee House Hours survey
Spreadsheet:	Denver's Coffee House Hours

SavvyDollar.Org is self billed as "North Carolina's source for savings... and members, (one in particular) are very helpful to each-other (and dedicated to the cause of saving money) it seems by sharing coupons using a list of available coupons on an online spreadsheet.

Site:	SavvyDollar.Org
Page/Post:	Available Coupons Spreadsheet posted
Spreadsheet:	JustBAMom's Coupon Treasures

The amount of information packed into the Fantasy Football Roster spreadsheet at The Swami's site is hard to believe. If you're into the game - you might want to get into this spreadsheet.

Site:	The Swami Fantasy Football
Page/Post:	Football Rosters as of 7/21/08
Spreadsheet:	2008 Fantasy Football Rosters

I've seen lots of event schedules on the web - particularly those conference schedules, with many days, many time slots each day and many "tracks" or rooms, each of which have their own set of event items. Spreadsheets, clearly work great for this - with the rows being the day/time and the columns being the rooms or tracks. This one, posted by the Boston Podcamp3 organizers is an example of such a schedule. It's not pretty in format, but it is funcitonal, collaborative (until locked by the owner), embedded in a web page and easily shared...

Site:	PodCamp3 Boston
Page/Post:	PodCamp3 Boston Schedule page
Spreadsheet:	Conference Schedule

Looks like a few friends are taking their workout challenge seriously - and they've got the data to prove it!

Site:	Pushing the Limit
Page/Post:	The 6-pack Challenge: day 28
Spreadsheet:	2008 Exercise Challenge

Serious fantasy sports leagues require serious data tracking and collaboration. Proof in this spreadsheet which is used by the "A Level Above" Fantasy Sports Site to track a Fantasy Golf game. Look through the blog post for some nice charts presenting some data analysis.

Site:	Fantasy Sports Commissioner's Blog
Page/Post:	Greatest Tournament Ever
Spreadsheet:	PGA Fantasy Golf Standings

The Steps on Our Journey blog re-linked to a Running Log which served as a reminder that spreadsheets and visualizations of data can help us track our own progress in life - not just at work. The author of this blog posted back in February a cool chart showing miles run per week. The latest post is a more detailed account of a specific race run, with a link back to the author's running log.

Site:	Steps on Our Journey
Page/Post:	Running!!
Spreadsheet:	Running Log

If you want to include information on a website and want the potentially (likely) non-technical owners of the website to be able to edit it themselves - what can you use? How about a spreadsheet? Michael, of the Experiments in Website Design blog, posted a simple example of this, where he used a spreadsheet to simply present a baseball league schedule in a form where the administrators of the league can now own their content without relying on him to change the site... They just log on to Google Docs, change the spreadsheet (data, of course, but even formatting) and push the 'publish' button...

Site:	Experiments in Website Design
Page/Post:	New Website Launched
Page with Spreadsheet:	Green Mountain Baseball League Season Schedule

MNPublius is a blog which is "tracking the status of Minnesota Politics", which, in a recent post, they've decided to visualize using charts and data summaries from a Google spreadsheet. They present the poll results for the 2008 senate race and presidential race as well as approval ratings of 3 local politicians. They've embedded these charts and data summaries right in their blog post, which makes it a nice visual page.
Note - this probably marks the beginning of some posts which point to examples of people using spreadsheet gadgets rather than pointing to the actual underlying spreadsheet itself). To see more examples, visit the Google Docs help center.

Site:	MNPublius Blog
Page/Post:	PMN Polling Report

A reader named Ray kindly submitted this a few weeks back - and I was just slow to add it...
He said: "I grew tired of having to be near one computer to update my workouts so I decided to use 'the Google'! Awesome tool - thanks for making training easier!"
This spreadsheet is practically a full software product if you're looking to track your triathlon training... multiple sheets, well formatted, nice charts, etc.

Spreadsheet:

Triathlon Training Log

CNet's Dennis O'Reilly posted a nice example of a tournament bracket using a spreadsheet. The News.com blog shows a screen shot of his creation as well as link to the published spreadsheet.

Site:	CNet News.com
Page/Post:	Use Google Docs to share and manage your NCAA basketball pool
Spreadsheet:	2008 NCAA Basketball Tournament Brackets

School sports are fun - but they're also serious business for people who track results and keep stats. Using spreadsheets and publishing as part of the official web site is what the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association has been doing. The sample below is a direct link to one sheet (one weight class) within one sport (wrestling) in one class (AA). The way they represented each weight class in a bracket style is worth a look... and, by the way, Congrats to Luke Frey - the Champion of the 103 lb. weight class ;)

Site:	Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Assoc.
Page/Post:	District IV data
Spreadsheet:	2008 Class AA Individual Wrestling Tournament ...make sure you click on a few sheets in there to get the full view of how they use this...

The site called Football's Future is overflowing with data about the American Football draft (or mock draft results)- position-by-position, player-by-player, you name it. The forums are very active as well with users offering all sorts of interesting data if you happen to love American Football. The spreadsheet link below shows position-by-position data on bids and signed status for certain players.... in a mock draft, I assume.

Site:	Football's Future - Forums
Page/Post:	FFMD08 Scouting Dept Post Prospect Data
Spreadsheet:	Position Bids Data (15 sheets)

If you've ever run any retail store, or any business which required full-time and part-time worker scheduling, you'll relate to this problem and solution. Flexibility in work schedules - which is par for the course with part-time workers - makes it very difficult not only to schedule people so that you have full coverage, but also to communicate the plans to everyone so they know when they are working. Well, Bayou Books has created a useful spreadsheet to show each person their hours of coverage.

Site:	Bayou Books
Page/Post:	Schedule for the week
Spreadsheet:	Work Schedule Spreadsheet

I've posted a few examples of bicycle riders who have somehow utilized spreadsheets to track and share their rides. Here's another one I cam across that made me want to do the same myself. It's got a nice chart at the top which shows the pattern of ride length over time. This rider's log has become a permanent link on the right pane of his blog, entitled "my cycling log", which has two tabs, one for last year and one for this yar.

Site:	Cycling in Seattle
Page/Post:	Seattle to North Bend & Back (100 miles)
Spreadsheet:	My Cycling Log: Rides 2008 (be sure to click on the "rides2007 tab too!)

CDB's personal running log is on a spreadsheet. It really is a great way to track personal progress against goals. The ++ part is how he then used this data to generate cool little graphics called 'sparklines' for his blog using Joe Gregorio's sparkline generator. Nice work.

Site:	CDB blog
Page/Post:	Running Spark
Spreadsheet:	Running Journal

Laurent Kretz posted useful data (which this blog cannot endorse as correct) showing US Delegates (yes, for the presidential election) by State, by Date, and with a summary. This is not the last example of such data presented in a spreadsheet this year, but this might give others some inspiration for more data analysis, maybe adding charts, etc.

Site:	Laurent Kretz blog
Page/Post:	1,312 Delegates to go
Spreadsheet:	Delegates per US State, etc.

Imagine a timeline of your life's experiences in a spreadsheet... for better or worse, I *can* imagine that - as I can relate to almost anything in a spreadsheet, and I can relate to the author of Hyperwest.net in his perception that "the days, weeks and months are just slipping by". Well he decided to start tracking his life in a spreadsheet timeline - in his words: "It's important to keep track of milestones in our lives -- big or small -- and I envision a future when everything you do, or did, will simply be online and interfaced with everyone else's lives. With each other's permission of course.". So he's included Jobs, relationships, residences, Trips, Events and more... Jon: please go check out MIT's Simile Timeline - and hook these two up...

Site:	Hyperwest.net Blog
Page/Post:	Timeline
Spreadsheet:	My So-called Life V1.0

There's plenty of political chatter, news and data on the web these days... A blogger known as "Indy" created his own "overly detailed spreadsheet of all the democratic party's numbers for the 2008 primary"... The formatting is nice, as he describes it: "I've color-coded some of the cells, so that it's easily visible where some "problem spots" are. What I mean by "problem spots" are places where the people made one choice, but the current political system stacked up against them anyway."

Site:	Indy CC Blog
Page/Post:	2008 Primaries Current Standings (Democratic)
Spreadsheets:	Democratic Primaries 2008 - Totals By State

The Unofficial Texas Tech Red Raiders blog published two spreadsheets to show how two different football recruiting sites ranked their team. Another good example of sports data sharing - and maybe they'll take this data and make one comparison sheet with a chart or two...

Site:	Double T Nation
Page/Post:	Recruiting Throughts
Spreadsheets:	Recruiting Rivals Avg. Rank Recruiting Avg. Rating - Scout

Musical Theater is not a job for the dis-organized. Well, Mr. Davis proves that he's the right guy for the job with this incredibly well-conceived spreadsheet for organizing his troupe of players for the 3 months leading up to a High School production. This is a great sample sheet for all you stage managers out there...

Site:	West High Choir Guy
Page/Post:	Rehearsal Calendar
Spreadsheet:	Master Calendar - Scene List

The Buy (Hold) & Write blog presents deep information and data on a "covered call investment strategy". There are spreadsheets with individual stock data (like the one we link to below), as well as Portfolilo Values and Transactions. The educational links on this site make it a very nice place to start when trying to learn about covered calls and investing in stocks overall.

Site:	Buy (Hold) & Write
Page/Post:	Pop Goes CYBS
Spreadsheet:	Break Even Analysis for CYBS

Only the most considerate bloggers will take the time to document and then publish their ratings of their favorite products and foods. Devious Bloggery doesn't sound like such a site by it's name, but his current Fish & Chips ratings spreadsheet includes even such measures as "Lack of Fish Slime" - which sounds like a helpful thing to check before heading out to satisfy your desire for Fish & Chips in Kansas City. Now, if we could only get someone to spread this to all cities, we could avoid ever having a bad Fish & Chips experience.

Site:	Devious Bloggery
Page/Post:	On a quest for KC's perfect Fish & Chips
Spreadsheet:	KC Fish and Chips

The Bargain Shopper Lady helps other shoppers find great deals. She publishes a spreadsheet in her current post to list a large set of Sara Lee products which are included in a "buy 5, get $10 coupon" deal. That's a dedicated shopper's advocate...

Site:	Bargain Shopper Lady
Page/Post:	Hot SaraLee Safeway Deal!
Spreadsheet:	SaraLee UPCs

The ACCstats blog posts just about every ACC college basketball statistic you could think of... and very often using an online spreadsheet. For example, the right side of the blog contains links to 12 spreadsheets - 1 for each team - with the detailed stats for every player on each team. That's the sample I'm giving below (for Boston College), but visit that blog for all of those and more great sports samples... [like this additional sample - which is prediction for N.C.State...which is a blog post with an embedded published spreadsheet...]

Site:	ACC Stats & More (blog)
Page/Post:	Game Preview: VPI at BC
Spreadsheet:	2008 Boston College (player stats)

Freediving is certainly not a mainstream sport - but, like other sports, it brings competition, which of course, leads to online spreadsheets of competitive results (what else could Freediving have in common with, say, Ice Hockey, except for the involvement of H2O ;). The Shark-Freediving blog is where I found this one, and it's a worth example of a competitive sports results spreadsheet. That Blog also had some incredible video and great information about the sport.

Site:	Shark FreeDiving Blog
Page/Post:	First Day's Results - Preparing for the next day
Spreadsheet:	FreeDiving Results

I've seen this a few times already, but hesitated posting it until now. Vaughn Seward - aka Masago - not only posts one form of poetry to his blog every day, but he also uses spreadsheets extensively to outline his works and some of he meanings and categories behind them. Possibly the most interesting non-numeric applications of spreadsheets I've seen. Now, if Vaughn begins to collaborate online with other poets, we may see a real boom in the real-time-collaborative-spreadsheet-based-poetry market ;)

Site:	Masago's Daily Haiku Blog
Page/Post:	Rengay through the seasons #21
Spreadsheet:	Haiku Poetry Spreadsheet

A user on the Chevy TrailBlazer and GMC Envoy forum posted a service history of his vehicle in a spreadsheet. It's not a template that you could use directly yourself, but it is a good sample - and if you really want a copy, the author offered to post an empty template (just go to the forum post and ask). It's certainly good practice to keep a service history like this in a form which could be shared quickly with prospective buyers.

Site:	Chevy TrailBlazer and GMC Envoy Forum
Page/Post:	Service History Spreadsheet post
Spreadsheet:	TrailBlazer Service History Sample

I've known some long-time tandem bike riders (yes, for the un-initiated, those are "bicycles built for two"), but the Stoked Blog (named for the term describing the power pedaler on the back - the Stoker) shows that tandem riding is also a domain for the serious biker and racer. Results for recent Tandem Biking time trials, including Heart Rate monitor data, were tracked on a spreadsheet very effectively.

Site:	Stoked
Page/Post:	Gentleman for 24 seconds
Spreadsheet:	Indoor Time Trial Nightly Results

uTIPu is a site which gives the software (tipCam) to capture your own help videos (tips) and a community site through which others can view your video. While the site seems new, someone has posted a video explaining their Google spreadsheet GPA calculator - with a video describing how to use it. They also used the often overlooked (uh... make that un-discoverable) feature called &newcopy, which lets you immediately give someone a copy of your spreadsheet when they click it... so we provide that type of link below as well.

The only thing the author has incorrect is the subtle mistake in "You need a Google (Gmail) account to use it."... A Google Account is NOT the same thing as a GMail account - even though a GMail account IS a Google account, you can also use your existing non-gmail email address to create a Google account and use Google Docs, Calendar, Alerts, Notebook, etc...

Site:	uTIPu
Page/Post:	GPA Calculator (video and spreadsheet links)
Spreadsheet:	GPA Calculator (view only)
Get Your Own Copy:	GPA Calculator (EDIT YOUR OWN)

An "online Health Mgmt Consultant" posted a great story of collaboration (not to mention customer service)... in his words:

"...while I was hiking up Mt.Sto.Tomas, a good friend sent me a TXT message asking me to help him crunch some numbers for a provincial health insurance scheme. [...] I rushed down the mountain, hitched a ride with a truck hauling cabbages and got to an internet cafe by 2pm. We crunched some numbers online using Google Spreadsheet and we generated this spreadsheet. There was actually a chat window right beside the spreadsheet so we could exchange notes as we were building up the spreadsheet."

There's way too little information on that blog to understand the spreadsheet in depth (or the author), but the story is fun.

Site:	thinklab.com.ph
Page/Post:	Online Health Management Consultancy
Spreadsheet:	Sample Health Micro insurance

Noah from the Commute by Bike blog (and his own KC Bike Commuting blog) has posted a very useful Bike Log spreadsheet which he plans to use to track all his biking miles in 2008. It's clear that this spreadsheet is useful, as he had a whole year of experience using his 2007 spreadsheet to learn what needed to change - so the 2008 version is sure to be a hit. As he says in his comment reply to other readers (who are also suggesting he check out bikejournal.com and other specific sites), "Google Spreadsheets lets you update from anywhere as well as collaborating with others, including revision control. It would be trivial to keep an online team spreadsheet for all of the bike commuters you know in town, or anything of the sort".

Site:	Commute By Bike blog and KC Bike Commuting blog
Page/Post:	Keep Track of your Riding
Spreadsheet #1:	2007 Bike Log Spreadsheet (this one is fully loaded with 2007 data)
Spreadsheet #2:	2008 Bike Log Spreadsheet (this one is improved, but almost empty, as he has just begun to use it in 2008) Get Your Own Blank Copy by Clicking Here (note, each click on this link will give you another copy in your google docs list)

Note: That "get your own copy" link above is a google spreadsheet version of the excel file posted by Noah on the Commute by Bike blog - which I've imported to give people more direct access. I only made one change to that file: I added a link back to the author's blog within the summary sheet. You can see a preview of it here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pO3Ze62OAU2HnHswCF-NCDw&hl=en

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