21st September 2007, 04:34 pm
I don’t know if anybody else is playing with Google Spreadsheets a lot, but it’s driving me a bit nuts. I got into the idea of importXML, but the way it’s coming out is just driving me crazy. For example:
… say I import an XML document, like a list of transactions. And I want to get three or four characteristics from each transaction. I can get them all from a single importXML, but Google Spreadsheets puts each characteristic on a different row. I want them all in one cell! Of course, I could just do an importXML for each item I wanted, but …
… Google Spreadsheets is limited to 50 function calls per sheet. ARGH! Only 50? This reminds me of when the Google API came out in 2003 and you could only use your key 1000 times a day, and that for ten results each time. You have this great tool and your brain is bubbling over with ways to use it — and you can’t! I would pay money for the ability to have 200 or so functions per sheet.
And it’s probably because I’m used to using Excel, but I find the cell editing in Google Spreadsheets completely counter-intuitive. If you’ve got a long URL to edit it seems you have to scroll all over the place to get to the end.
Finally, I still can’t figure out how often the spreadsheets with feeds in them update. Some very clever people on Google Groups have been running experiments, and the consensus seemed to be every hour. But I have a couple of published spreadsheets with feeds in them, and I can’t see that they’ve updated at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the import option on the spreadsheets is an excellent tool. I just wish I weren’t bashing my head into the wall quite so much.
21st September 2007, 04:00 pm
I mentioned earlier this week that the New York Times was going to open part of its archives. Since then I’ve been having fun playing through the older part of the archives. Having fun however does involve a little digging through the search options.
The New York Times only gives you the option to search all archives or all archives since the beginning, and not the public domain archives from 1851-1922. this link will take you to a search for just those years (and a keyword search for cow. I’m figuring you’ll want to change that.)
The really fun stuff starts, though, when you click the Advanced link that’s next to the search button. That’ll let you search by author or headline. Try searching for folks like Alcott. You’ll get a letter Louisa May Alcott wrote to the NYT in 1883 emphasizing her support for women’s suffrage. Try Mark Twain. You’ll get a variety of articles and letters to the editor including one where he complains about a baby which keeps him awake constantly and laments installing a burglar alarm because the baby works just as well. Try Charles Dickens. Try Wodehouse and you will get one letter from PG which starts, “Mr. Williams is all wrong. (I’m not arguing, I’m just telling him.)”
When you get tired of searching for famous authors and other folks who might have contributed to the Times, try searching for unlikely words in headlines. Like computers. That one’s fun. Digital, alas, brings only articles about pianists, but searching the full text of the archive for mechanical turk brings articles about the chess playing hoax.
The articles in this archive are only available as PDF documents, and some of them are easier to read than others. But I found only one I couldn’t get through at all; great stuff here.
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21st September 2007, 03:15 pm
