Spreadsheet gadgets: free collaborative spreadsheets for your web products or services

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager, Google Spreadsheets

If your company, organization or customers are in love with spreadsheets (might be more like a love-hate thing), and you want to more easily integrate other data, services or logic into your spreadsheets, you're in luck. If you're a web software developer looking for simple, collaborative data on the web, you're also in luck.

Using Google spreadsheet gadgets, your programs (html/javascript/flash) can be easily integrated with spreadsheets - either within the spreadsheet itself, or embedded in any web page, where it can access data from a google spreadsheet. Building great re-usable products using this technology is simple - simple enough to make this platform viable even for one-off, custom capabilities. Of course, if the organization you're targeting is a Google Apps user, they'll even be able to use your cool new gadget on their Start Page.

So if you need a specialized, spreadsheet-friendly capability - a special report format, a lookup to an external data source, a custom visualization or chart, a specialized calculation - take a look at spreadsheet gadgets. You might get some ideas of what's possible by looking at some currently available gadgets made by google and other developers.

For example, here's a Gantt Chart Gadget (powered by ViewPath) that’s reading data from a spreadsheet. You or a collaborator could update the underlying spreadsheet - and wham, the Gantt chart is updated. You could even feed that spreadsheet from a form...



Just to prove you can create practically anything, here's a Pile of Money Gadget embedded directly in a spreadsheet to give a vivid representation of cost trade-offs:


...the possiblities are endless. To get started, check out the documentation.