Using Google Spreadsheets Like a Database

"Create a new sheet, call it “My Queries” or something similar and in cell A1 enter the formula:

=QUERY(‘Institutional Table 2010-2011′!A1:K118,”Select A”)

What happens? Column A is pulled into the spreadsheet is what. So how does that work?

The =QUERY() formula, which has the basic form =QUERY(RANGE,DATAQUERY), allows us to run a special sort of query against the data specified in the RANGE. That is, you can think of =QUERY(RANGE,) as specifying a database; and DATAQUERY as a database query language query (sic) over that database."

http://blog.ouseful.info/2010/01/19/using-google-spreadsheets-like-a-database-the-query-formula

Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets

"The Google spreadsheet function =importHTM(”",”table”,N) will scrape a table from an HMTL web page into a Google spreadsheet. The URL of the target web page, and the target table element both need to be in double quotes. The number N identifies the N’th table in the page (counting starts at 0) as the target table for data scraping."

http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/data-scraping-wikipedia-with-google-spreadsheets/

OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheets - Data Validity dropdown list

"... you can type or select the first item from a list, and have one or more of the other associated pieces of data pop into the cells next to it. You use =VLOOKUP() OR =HLOOKUP to do this."



http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2008/07/using-vlookup-or-hlookup-in-openofficeorg-calc-spreadsheets-with-a-data-validity-dropdown-list.html

More on Excel in-cell graphing

"We received an enthusiastic response to our post on in-cell bar graphs in Excel. The community quickly explored every edge case. I want to highlight some of the great ideas raised.

Henk was first out of the gate with a great suggestion that two columns could be used to show positive and negative values."

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/more-on-excel-in-cell-graphing/

Lightweight data exploration in Excel

"We often are given a chunk of data in Excel that we need to explore. Of course, the first tool you should pull out of your toolbox in cases like this is the trusty PivotTable (it slices, it dices!). But at times we have to dig a little deeper into the toolbox and pull out the in-cell bar chart."

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/lightweight-data-exploration-in-excel/