Have you ever come up with such an idea?
Why would you do that?
The possibilities of spreadsheets are huge. There are plenty of ways to use them. And definitely using spreadsheets you can process and visualize data.
Spreadsheets serve as one of the main tools for the majority of companies in the world.
Spreadsheets have the best user interface ever created. People are just getting it kind of naturally.
It is easy to learn, easy to use, easy to implement, and easy to integrate.
It is proved, in particular, by Excel, one of the most successful software in history. According to Microsoft, Excel is used by every fifth adult person on earth.
Interestingly, there are currently many startups that consider spreadsheets to be their main competitor.
Let’s start
We can do it using overfetch.com.
First, we have to connect to the database. For our example, we may use the Airline On-Time Performance Database.
Then we need to create a new SQL query (let’s name it the Chicago flights):
After running the query we are getting the following result:
Next, we need to create the Data URL (we are using the same name – the Chicago flights). Here we have links ready for sharing:
We use the CSV URL
https://overfetch.com/r/nC1jR26cd642aHCGmyFVbY7Pp8mbRj1nIYmCSEQWPwB7Dhku.csv
to load the data into Excel,
and the Google Sheets formula
=IMPORTDATA(“https://overfetch.com/r/data-url/1d1ee3e79c73/nC1jR26cd642aHCGmyFVbY7Pp8mbRj1nIYmCSEQWPwB7Dhku.csv”)
to load the data into Google Sheets.
See how it works:
This is our CSV:
We may open a worksheet in Excel and from the Data tab select Get External Data, and click on From Web. Further, we will need to paste the link, adjust the separator if required, and import the data:
Or we may want to open Google Sheets and simply paste the Google Sheets formula in the cell that we wish to:
Once done we may want to build say a bar chart based on the data:
Sure we may use CSV URL for other tools, such as Jupyter:
Why not share the result with other stakeholders using the basic features of Google Sheets or Excel?
Check this link:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VBEt1ANOBSWCmP_2-rq8Gyw9ZMbvZVhP5lvlw_6S7bs
We can click the menu button in Google Sheets in the upper right corner of the chart and publish our chart to the web in a graphical or interactive format:
Interactive Embedded Google Sheets Bar Chart
We may share our visualization via the link:
You as well as your business users may work with this data in the spreadsheets, or you may stick with SQL because amazingly both Excel and Google Sheets even in their free version support the Refresh function.
Having all these why not try building a kind of real-time dashboard in the spreadsheets?!
However, this is the subject of another post.