Thursday 1 December 2011

Playing Around with ImportXML in Google Spreadsheets


Via Scoop.it - New Digital Media

It’s frustrating trying to get XML data into Microsoft Excel – unless you’ve got the time and patience to build some basic Macros or VBscript for your requirements. With Google Docs, it’s really easy.
A few resources:
If you want to use Google Docs to extract data from the web, it would be a good idea for you to learn a little xPath. “XPath is used to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document”, or, in simple terms, you can use xPath to fetch little bits of data contained in structured elements like ,or links or pretty much anything, really. Also, there are a few people who have been doing this a while, and probably have sample spreadsheets that blow some of the examples below away – but you have to start somewhere, right? If you’re already an importXML / Google Docs Ninja, maybe go and find something else to do instead of reading this post.
If you’re interested, I made a Google Docs Spreadsheet with all of the examples below: http://bit.ly/9Fs7aF

Does anyone know?

“Does anyone know” is such an interesting search on Twitter – just combine that query with a keyword, like “restaurant” and a location for everyone on Twitter looking for a very specific, thing. Great if you happen to be trading in that thing.
anyone know
Try a query like this to pull through results from the Twitter search RSS feed:
OR+birmingham”)
anyone-know-data
►Mini Matmian:
A useful function with many applications. Thanks to SEOGadget for sharing. I can see the guys at Matmi having some fun messing around with this.

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