The Minority Report

Matt Cutts, Google Engineer extraordinaire, posted this today about driving Google Spreadsheets with Python. Pretty cool.

I did some searching and found this page, which quickly led me to the Python Developer’s Guide for the Google Spreadsheet API.

There’s a simple “Getting started with Gdata and Python” page. The upshot is 1) make sure you have a recent version of Python (e.g. 2.5 or higher), then 2) install the Google Data Library.

Write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script

gdata-python-client – Google Code

Here is the original July, 2007 article from the Speaking thru experience blog:

Programming with web API’s is a new thing to me, and this is the first web api I have used. I have encounter a number of troubles before getting things to work and that is why I am writing this post as an additional to their guide especially for beginners like me.

I am using python to work with the api, but this could be applicable to other languages since most of the problems I am dealing with are XML related I guess. For this little & simple application that I am trying to create the operations I perform are:

* Connecting to Google Spreadsheet Service
* Opening the spreadsheet and worksheet you wish to work with
* Writing into the spreadsheet
* Reading spreadsheet

Beginners guide for Google Spreadsheet API