Minnesota Politics viewed through spreadsheet gadgets

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

Triathlon Training Log (Reader Submission)

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

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)

Work Schedule Planning spreadsheet

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

Bicycling and spreadsheets meet in Seattle

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!)

Personal Running Log ++

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

Delegate data tastes good on a spreadsheet

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.

Spreadsheet of Memories

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

Presidential Primary Data with some analysis

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

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