Finding Spreadsheets With Google

Automate Excel, which I am still enjoying very much, has a 'blog entry on finding spreadsheets with Google. ( http://www.automateexcel.com/index.php/2005/07/23/google_for_spreadsheets ).

More power to you but you can have even more fun with this if you use a couple other special syntax. For example, try adding site:edu to your search in addition to the keywords. For an international flavor try adding site:uk. And of course you can also do title searches as well. Try this:

intitle:gantt filetype:xls site:edu

Always more fun to mix syntax. Also remember that XLS isn't the only kind of spreadsheet; ever thought of searching for filetype:csv? Or ( filetype:csv | filetype:xls ) ?

As far as I can tell Google doesn't try to confirm a filetype; it simply searches for the string at the end of the file name. Therefore these are legit searches and at this writing do present results.

filetype:weatherwax inurl:weatherwax
filetype:feathers inurl:feathers
filetype:hamburger inurl:hamburger
filetype:montypython inurl:montypython

(You can't use the filetype: syntax alone in a search, but you can work around that by teaming it with the inurl: syntax.)

There are some files out there tagged as xls variants; with a little creativity you might be able to go beyond the basic filetype:xls results...

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