How to Create Embeddable Spreadsheets for Your Blog
By Drew Meyers | May 7, 2008
If you ask me, one of the hardest pieces of blogging is consistently finding content ideas. One possible source of interesting content is pure data — essentially, anything in a spreadsheet is potential blog content.
Though Google Docs can also be used to embed a spreadsheet, the tool I’m going to demonstrate is EditGrid. Here is a step-by-step to turning a spreadsheet into an embeddable piece of content for your blog or website.
Step 1: Sign-up for an account.
Step 2: Create a new spreadsheet. First, login to your newly created account and navigate to your workspace by clicking the “My Workspace” tab in the upper right. Then click the “Create New” button highlighted below.
Step 3: Find the data you want to embed from an excel spreadsheet. I’m going to use the Zillow’s Q1 market report for the San Diego MSA as an example.
Step4: Copy all the desired data into your EditGrid worksheet(s). I chose to have 3 sheets within my document; one for the MSA overview data, one for neighborhoods, and one for zip codes. I included several columns of data in each sheet — Zindex, quarter over quarter change, year over year change, 5 year annualized change, and 10 year annualized change.
Step 5: Grab the embed code for your blog — navigate to the publish tab and then click widgets, then html table.
That will bring up a pop-up box that provides you the embed code for your website or blog.
You’re now ready to go — here is the final result embedded in a blog post:
In my mind, real estate market trends and analysis is the best use of embedded spreadsheets, but that’s not to say there aren’t other uses — any dataset is blog-able. Other examples of how EditGrid could be utilized include embedding details of all your prior sales transactions (prices, neighborhoods, addresses), MLS sales data, or even creating your own interactive mortgage calculator.
There you have it; a spreadsheet embedded in your blog in less than 5 minutes!
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Author's Website: http://www.zillow.com
Topics: Blogging |
7 Responses to “How to Create Embeddable Spreadsheets for Your Blog”
Comments
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May 7th, 2008 at 10:24 am
[…] Update 5/6: If you want to create your own spreadsheet and embed it on your blog, Drew just wrote a “how-to” post at Geek Estate Blog. […]
May 7th, 2008 at 11:03 am
That is what I’ve been looking for. Much better than a simple table in a post, plus all the other benefits you mentioned.
Thanks.
May 7th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Drew,
Great post. I haven’t used this particular software before, but have used alot of the Zoho Suite of products to place documents, spreadsheets, and even charts (with some level of success) into different blogs.
We have played around with this type of data extensively when releasing our 2007 Chicago Neighborhood report this year. (www.atproperties.com/marketreport) This is our “Beta or 1.0″ version of the data but have been looking to take it and incorporate Fusion Charts (www.fusioncharts.com) to make it a little more visually appealing.
I might recommend that if you’re going to go to all this work to put the Sheet online, that you could spend another 5 mintues taking it to the next level with Fusion Charts??? Thoughts?
Great Post and something to play with.
Matt Dollinger
@properties
Performance Coach
www.TheYouFactor.com
May 7th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Any way to do it with a WordPress.com blog? iFrames are not allowed.
May 7th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Tim-
This blog is a wordpress blog — so yes, it should work. The trick is that you need to add the embed code and hit “publish” from the code editor rather than the visual editor.
May 7th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Hi Drew,
Thanks for putting up such a detail guide to adding our blog widget.
@Tim, you’re right! Blogs hosted on wordpress.com will not work with iframes. Our bad for not noticing this before. We’ll seek alternatives to fix this.
Angus
EditGrid Team
May 8th, 2008 at 8:51 am
[…] Okay, this is way-cool. My favorite geek, Drew Meyers, shared his latest tech toy on the Geek Estate Blog. […]