Thanks to Geography 2.0: Virtual Globes for news that excellent online spreadsheet EditGrid now has an official add-on that supports the creation of KML for spreadsheet data. This means that spreadsheet data can be displayed on a Google Map or Google Earth.
Online spreadsheets lend themselves to all sorts of collaborative projects, whether sharing weather data, fieldwork measurements or any other kind of spatially located information. EditGrid is very student-friendly and intuitive to work with, as the following demonstration shows.
I have created a open spreadsheet which is dynamically illustrated below (i.e it will update when the data set is edited.)
Online Spreadsheet by user/juicygeography.
Feel free to edit and contribute to the spreadsheet, click the “done” button and observe the changes in the map below. I would be interested in ideas for potential projects. Note that the spreadsheet requires longitude and latitude in decimal format. Here is an online converter. Many online maps, such as Multimap will output coordinates as decimal degrees to save the hassle.
The spreadsheet can also be seen in Google Earth.
Click here for the file.
Note that you’ll need to refresh the network link once loaded in Google Earth in order to see any changes to the spreadsheet. (Right-click on the folder and choose ‘refresh’)
I wonder how long it will be before Google Spreadsheets adds similar functionality? There are other free online spreadsheets, for example IRows which offers a chart function. EditGrid remains my favourite for several reasons. It’s very easy to use, there are several options for exporting the data and publishing to web pages. Judging by the EditGrid blog there’s lots more features to come soon, including charts (yay!) EditGrid is open source, free to use and a triumph for the developers.
That would seem to make a lot of things easier…
Google Spreadsheets tied to Google Map…
Just think, the needed code to put a map on a site could be as simple as defining…
map size
spreadsheet link to get markers
Graydon
I like your demonstration. I used a similar demo as part of a proposal I made to re-do a website for a geomatics research group in Nova Scotia. My spreadsheet demo had nine cells. Placename, Lat, lon for three locations. Click on the placename when the lat, lon, were completed and Googleearth was launched heading directly for the placename clicked.
Here is a suggestion for a teaching exercise to learn capitals of countries for example.
This requires someone who is skilled with spreadsheet functions.
Have three columns set up on a spreadsheet. Column one are for countries. Column two
are blank cells. Column three are capitals (not aligned to matching countries). If the student places the correct name of the capital next to the country a tag will be placed on the map at the correct capital location.
Similar spreadsheets could be set up to match other items.
Very impressive. Full of possibilities.
I am Chiu from EditGrid.
Thanks for showing the possibilities of Online spreadsheets and KML!
Grid2Map now support showing Line on Google Map.
We have got even more possibilities now~
Let’s have fun with it.
it would b must more usefull if the map was bigger like the size of a page then i would b able to make more sence of it!!