Fun with Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables

I’ve been having a lot of fun with Google tools today, and I wanted to share. This morning I was interested in generating this pie chart from the data off of Data.gov in my last post but needed to get all the data out of the Data.gov Data Catalog first.

Google Spreadsheets actually makes this really easy — if you know what you’re doing:

Step 1: Create a new spreadsheet, and put this little line in a cell:

=importHtml("http://www.data.gov/catalog#raw","table",2)

Step 2: There is no step 2. You’re done.

Cool huh? You’ve now got a spreadsheet of all the data in Data.gov. But that’s not what I wanted– what I wanted was a count of each data source by agency to see who was providing the most data. The answer here was Google’s new Fusion Tables. In Fusion Tables, I can then take the data, create an aggregation and provide me the counts, imported from my Google Spreadsheet.

Easy data analysis without a lick of code.