MaxLibris

Thanks to a post I read in ResearchBuzz this week via Bloglines, I have been playing around with one of the newest features of Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It now allows you to pull in tabular data, rss feeds and list data! So no more copying and pasting from one page to another or retyping the data. It’s very neato-keen.

Here is an example I played with - where I pulled RSS data from CNN and tabular data from an article on Wikipedia. Of course there was a little bit of junk in the results but overall I thought it worked nicely. Then I could perhaps insert that nicely created table in a report I was giving - or enhance the table by making a chart out of it.

Here is the Help page for this - which gives you the low-down on all of the queries - but the article on ResearchBuzz gives some great examples as well.