Tag Archive: Google

Kicking off Sunlight’s Transparency Camp West

by Jake Brewer Aug 8, 2009 11:06 am

Transparency Camp is an un-conference designed to convene a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.

Fun with Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables

by Clay Johnson

technology

Jun 12, 2009 12:48 pm

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.