Posted by Justin Kosslyn, Google Spreadsheet Team
Want to develop new features for google spreadsheets? Want a dynamic, collaborative data store for gadgets embedded in your site? If you answered “yes” to either question, you’re in luck – spreadsheet gadgets can be embedded directly in spreadsheets or use spreadsheets as dynamic data stores.
For example, here’s a Motion Chart gadget that’s reading data from a spreadsheet. You or a collaborator can add more data to the gadget by modifying the underlying spreadsheet.
Or here's a much simpler example that just integrates Google maps with a simple spreadsheet:
You can extend any existing gadget into a spreadsheet gadget with the Google Visualization API. When your gadgets are ready for prime time, you can submit them to the Gallery and possibly get your gadgets featured on our Gadget picker within the Google Docs spreadsheets editor. So, whether you're just looking for a simple, dynamic database for your gadget, or want to integrate your other web products or services with Google Docs, check out this platform.
For more information, please check out our new developer documentation, Getting Started with Spreadsheet Gadgets.
We’ll also soon be expanding our APIs to allow your gadgets to write data back to an underlying Spreadsheet.
Give us feedback using our Feedback Form, where you can also let us know if you are interested in participating in early testing of the expanded read-write API.
