The company has added sophisticated visuals to Spreadsheets through Gadgets, offering developers a new way to distribute data and develop apps

Google on Wednesday unveiled Gadgets for Spreadsheets in Google Docs, allowing people to create graphical representations of data in spreadsheets and publish them on websites.

For consumers, this means that they now have a dozen or so new ways to look at data in their spreadsheets. Google has put up a gallery of specialty gadgets to choose from. These include gadgets to display data on a pie chart, map, time chart, funnel chart, Gantt chart, pivot table and heat map, if it's geographical data. Users can even create interactive charts, such as those used by Google Finance and for motion charts.

These visuals can also be pushed out to appear on an iGoogle home page or any other site, and they will be dynamically updated as changes are made to the spreadsheet.

Gadgets will soon be coming to other applications in Google Docs, and eventually search, to help people find relevant content and links, according to Jonathan Rochelle, senior product manager for Google Docs.

Google has also added new features that make using Spreadsheets easier. Firstly, there is a notification system that will email users when somebody has made a change to a spreadsheet that is being collaborated on. They can also set the system to alert them once a day or after each new change is made. The changes are highlighted so users can easily detect what is new.

There is also a column-based, auto-complete function that looks for cues from adjacent cells to try to guess what a user is typing, and an updated colour palette and function-editing capability that uses the arrow keys, as well as an auto-complete function for typing long formulas.

In addition, spreadsheet creators now have access to historical stock-market data through a Google Finance function and new functions to automatically sort and filter data.

Google is extending the Gadgets platform, making Gadgets a data source for spreadsheets, as well as a data-distribution method for developers.

"If I'm collecting census data and putting it into a spreadsheet, I can also make that data available to statisticians," through the Visualization API, said Rochelle. "It doesn't have to be in a spreadsheet form," to distribute, he added.

Spreadsheets is just the first data source that can be handled this way.

"We're making the spreadsheet almost a platform for simple development and delivery," Rochelle said.

Copyright © 1995-2008 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CNET Networks, Inc. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CNET Networks, Inc.