How to Create Embeddable Spreadsheets for Your Blog
May 7, 2008
By: Drew Meyers
Author's Website: http://youreachmedia.com
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!
- Stumble it!
- Categories: Blogging
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Bloggers: Q1 Home value report data is portable! | Zillow® Blog on May 7, 2008 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. [...]
John Lauber on May 7, 2008 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.
Matt Dollinger on May 7, 2008 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
http://www.TheYouFactor.com
Tim Ayres on May 7, 2008 12:48 pm
Any way to do it with a WordPress.com blog? iFrames are not allowed.
Drew Meyers on May 7, 2008 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.
Angus Lau on May 7, 2008 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
The San Diego Home Blog » Blog Archive » Scripps Ranch Homeowners Associations on May 8, 2008 8:51 am
[...] Okay, this is way-cool. My favorite geek, Drew Meyers, shared his latest tech toy on the Geek Estate Blog. [...]
Rob at Real Estate Chocolate - Ridgefield, CT Real Estate on May 13, 2008 5:45 pm
Including spreadsheet data has been difficult from day 1 on my WP blog. I finally started using a plug-in called wp-table. It’s OK but not feature rich.
I do have a question about editgrid: if you use this method of including information, how does google handle it for SEO?
Thanks!
Angus Lau on May 14, 2008 2:21 am
Google handle the content in our widget separately from the blog due to the use of iframes.
Google will crawl and cache any publicly readable spreadsheet but when displayed in search result, it will direct you to the spreadsheet hosted on EditGrid and not your blog with the embedded spreadsheet.
Rob at Real Estate Chocolate - Ridgefield, CT Real Estate on May 14, 2008 4:18 am
Thanks Angus. That’s what I thought would happen. I’ll take a look at editgrid and see if I can get it to work in WP.
RV on March 17, 2010 11:08 pm
this is great for my blog…
tim on April 2, 2010 6:51 am
Editgrid is down … do you have the plugin that you can share?
tim on April 2, 2010 1:51 pm
Editgrid is down … do you have the plugin that you can share?