Motivation

Our first contact with Google Gadgtes was during Google Developer Day, that we were so happy to attend. We found out about the gadget contest there and thought that it would be a good idea to take part in it.

As we use plenty of Google products (Calendar, Spreadsheets, Analytics, etc.), one of the gadgets we like the most is the one that allows to have the calendar inside iGoogle. This helps to use the calendar in a very straightforward way, without having to overcome the laziness of opening it in a different window, when trying to check or modify something.

We realized that there was not a similar gadget for Google Spreadsheets. As we use them a lot, and many times just to do a small operation, we thought that it would be great to have a gadget like the ones we finally developed, so we just put our hands into coding right away.

Development

Fairly soon we realized that reading from a Sheet and editing that content were different problems. Reading could be achieved by using sheet feeds, but edition required fighting against access matters. We didn’t have so much time, so G worked on the Reader while J played with permissions to add the necessary parts to create the Editor.

By the way, in our opinion, having the Editor doesn’t mean that the Reader has no longer sense, as it has other advantages: its use is more direct and one can also read sheets which are not owned by oneself.

Finally, the contest deadline day (2007 06 30) we submitted both gadgets.

Improvements

Some ideas we have that could improve these gadgets:

• be able to show different sheets in a document in the Editor (now you can only edit first one).
• be able to insert rows and columns in the Editor.
• show cells with their format.
• be able to change tab names.

Do you have any other suggestion? Let us know! 🙂

News

Update: Google Spreadsheet Viewer was named Mashup of the Day 7/7/07 at Programmable Web!

Update: Google Spreadsheet Editor was named Mashup of the Day 15/7/07 at Programmable Web!

Update: Working example of Google Spreadsheet Viewer here.