Connecting Data Using Google Spreadsheets

A short video tutorial from Google reminds us that Google Spreadsheets has a lot of functions that pull data from the web: facts, financial information, feeds and other files. You obtain interesting results when you use the result from a function as an input for another function. And if you combine this with the magical autofill powered by Google Sets, your spreadsheets is populated with related names and words.

It's enough to write in a column the name of two or three countries from South America and you can obtain the rest of the countries, their capitals, a description from Wikipedia. If you publish the spreadsheet, you can show the locations on a map. From a simple list of country names to a map with automatically generated descriptions, from a list of companies to a stock portfolio, Google Spreadsheets and other Google APIs can be the bridge.