How to Create Embeddable Spreadsheets for Your Blog

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!