Create an Olympics Medal Map using Google Spreadsheets

This is a very detailed "How-to" blog post which takes the reader step-by-step through the creation of a "HeatMap". This is the sort of visual presentation that shows "heat" (color intesity) using some data points connected to physical locations - like countries, in this case - as the source. The post describes taking data from the web, putting the data into a useful form and then creating the map using spreadsheet gadgets. Very well done - except that the author did not provide a link to the underlying spreadsheet example for readers to use as a starting point.

Site:	OUseful.Info, the blog...
Page/Post:	Create an olympics medal map using a spreadsheet
Spreadsheet:	spreadsheet link not provided

Canadian Women's Hockey League knows spreadsheets

The Oakville Hornets women's hockey league of Ontario, Canada probably have quite an online audience, given the number of teams and players they support. It looks like (at a quick glance) around 8 leagues with as many as 16 or 24 teams in some of those. They use spreadsheets extensively in their Tournament Standings pages - publishing updated standings with embedded published spreadsheets in web pages. If you're wondering why they'd do this - imagine the difference between updating HTML versus a spreadsheet each time a game is played... then imagine you need to add up total wins, or calculate win pctg. Much easier in a spreadsheet than an HTML page. Opens up the task to practically anyone in the organizations instead of just a webmaster. Nice job, Hornets!

Site:	Oakville Hornets Hockey
Sample Page:	Tournament Standings (sample)
Spreadsheet:	Schedule of games & standings

Hockey Stats in spreadsheets - prospective Buffalo Sabres

The Sabres Prospects blog uses spreadsheets effectively to publish statistics on prospective hockey players. In the right pane of their blog, you'll find a few links to a spreadsheet in the "Statistics" section. Notice that the links are to different individual sheets within the same spreadsheet file (workbook). You can build individual links like that using the "More Publishing Options" link on the publishing dialog within the spreadsheets editor on Google Docs...

Site:	Sabres Prospects
Main Spreadsheet:	Sabres Prospects Stats
Detail sheet:	Shooting MPH sheet

Superbowl Box Pool - almost automated

Here's a fun online Superbowl Box Pool on a spreadsheet - which lets you collect player's names using an online FORM. The spreadsheet randomizes the assignment of boxes and scores...

Site:	My Personal Blog (JRsays)
Page/Post:	Last-Minute Superbowl Pool
Spreadsheet:	Box Pool Spreadsheet

Fantasy Football Data, Data and more Data

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

Peer Pressure Workouts

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

Fantasy Golf Deserves Fantastic Spreadsheets

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

Keep a running Log of your Running

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

Spreadsheets as a web page content editor

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

NCAA March Madness Basketball Brackets

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 Data - Brackets and all

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...

Football (NFL) Draft Data

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)

Texas Tech Football Rankings

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

Detailed Sports Statistics - College Basketball

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 Competition Results

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

Serious Bicycling, Tandem Style

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

Logging your Biking and Commuting Miles

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

Bike Race Results

In their own words: "Bike Monkey is a growing advocacy group in Sonoma County that aims to utilize cycling as a means of benefiting the community in a variety of ways."... They used a spreadsheet to show the results of a bike race, which looks lke a good template for other bikers out there.

Site:	Bike Monkey
Page/Post:	Blog posts in November
Spreadsheet:	Lake Sonoma Bike Race Results

Fantasy Basketball Tracking

Fantasy sports players are some of the most creative spreadsheet users. Here's a sample from the NBA.Com fantasy leagues, where a user posted his spreadsheet link for his league by division, draft round, etc. It's very nicely formatted and a great example for those of you aspiring fantasy sports coaches.

Site:	NBA.Com
Page/Post:	Fantasy Forums (specific post removed it seems)
Spreadsheet:	Basketball Fantasy League Tables

Compiled List of Running Races

This spreadsheet will prove very useful to those runners in Central Ohio who agree with DrewEOB on the runningahead.com forums - who says: "I'm not a huge fan of fishing through five or more sites to find some races, so I put together my listing. It's certainly not exhaustive, but it's got some depth...". Wouldn't it be nice if there were one of these for every state or region!? (i can't understand why Drew didn't post a link to this spreadsheet from his own blog... it's really useful!)

Site: RunningAhead.com forums
Page/Post: Central Ohio race Listing
Spreadsheet: Upcoming Races in Central Ohio