A Couple of Google Spreadsheets Tricks
I've seen the mentions of Google Spreadsheets (GS) now being able to provide live (or almost live) stock quotes recently. If you combine this quote ability with GS's ability to publish documents to share with others, and with the its robust response to being placed in an IFRAME tag, you can get some pretty cool results.
Below, I've embedded a list of the "Dow 30" components.
The magic with the stock quotes happens by placing something like the following into a cell.
=GoogleFinance("RHAT","price")
Where RHAT is the stock ticker symbol of Red Hat. Of course, you can change this to anything you like. Of course, you'll probably have more reason to reference a cell containing the stock quote.
In my case, using McDonald's (MCD) as an example, my cells for Open, Price, Change, Volume, and MarketCap are...
=GoogleFiance(T1,"Open")
=GoogleFinance(T1,"Price")
=GoogleFinance(T1,"Change")
=GoogleFinance(T1,"Volume")
=GoogleFinance(T1,"MarketCap")
...respectively. T1 refers to the cell of the MCD ticker symbol in the above examples. If you'd like a complete list of definitions or available functions, check Google's help. In addition, these quotes will update live as you edit the spreadsheet. The "published" spreadsheet can also be set to update every five minutes.
To embed the spreadsheet as I did above, I included this HTML.
<p><iframe width='500' height='400' frameborder='0' scrolling='auto' src='http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pbbRTz3HM3-I3MGtrNHPiJg&output=html&gid=0&single=true&range=A1:F31&widget=true'></iframe></p>
Note that you need to change only the SRC URL up to the first ampersand. The contents after the first ampersand flag some options for embedding with the Google (including a specification of mine to view only a certain range - so don't think you'll be secure by just publishing confidential information out of this range.
So what's so cool? If you have a table for a blog or web page, and you'd like to keep the information up to date, you can simply maintain this via Google Spreadsheets and keep it embedded on an otherwise static web page. It might have some functionality for those office Superbowl betting pools; you won't have to make your participants wait until Monday to verify they've won.
Also, read up on the GoogleLookup function. It will give you access to a variety of almanac-style pieces of information - such as geography, population, science, and history.
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