Google Charts

While I wasn't looking, Google has made some major improvements to their spreadsheets. One impressive capability is the ability to generate charts from dynamic data. Here are some examples:

Here is a more complex trig function charted:

And of course, the ever present pie chart. Google documents appears to be practically all I need from Excel in terms of charts.

Of course, the real payoff is when you can chart dynamic data retrieved from sources of data on the web. Here is the temperatures this month in Boston derived from numeric values on a web site generated by the National Weather Service and charted by me in Google Spreadsheets. As the days go on, new entries will appear in the website and be appropriately added to the end of the chart, all without me lifting a finger...

Pretty cool stuff.

I have always been fascinated by taking data produced by one system and combining with either data from another place or processing it automatically to produce something else. These days these are called "mashups". In the last 20 years this is the easiest way I have ever done this. You've been able to do this with excel for a long time, but it is far more complex and awkward. Google really understands the web and creates systems that work well on the web.