Sunday, April 29, 2007

See your spreadsheet as a draggable timeline

Thanks to a chance online stumbling across Kiyo's Blog (ok, "chance online stumbling" is more like a link in my email triggered by a google alert for 'google spreadsheet' ;), I discovered this really cool open source timeline widget in the form of a Sample Timeline using a Google spreadsheet. So it was a double bonus for me.. a cool widget and, even better, a great use case for the spreadsheets API !

Now I could have discovered this earlier if I watched everything that came out the developer pages of Google - as this widget was highlighted previously as a
Google Code Sample related to using Google Calendar API.... but Kiyohito Yamamoto saved me the trouble of both recognizing the opportunity and then coding a spreadsheet-sourced timeline... Thanks Kiyo!

5 comments:

rkudasik said...

Hey man, I am trying to use the google spreadsheets timeline widget. Can you send me an example spreadsheet range? I am having trouble getting it to work; all I need is to see how the data is laid out...thanks!

JR said...

Hi - funny that you commented on this old post... as i didn't know back in APril 2007 that this would be foreshadowing to me actually helping to code the Timeline gadget for spreadsheets...
Anyway...

Here's a published version of a sample:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pO3Ze62OAU2Ev1xfh3TWsWA

and here's a link which will give you your OWN COPY in Google Docs as soon as you click it if you are already logged into your google account:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pO3Ze62OAU2Ev1xfh3TWsWA&newcopy

And... finally... here's a help page for that gadget:http://jrochelle.googlepages.com/97g-timeline-about.html

Have fun!

rkudasik said...

Yeah, your name with a link to your blog is on the help page for the gadget. I just did a search for "timeline." That helped so much. Thanks. I think I'm too far into my project to convert it into this format...maybe not though. This gadget is wonderful. thanks!

Cameron said...

JR,

The timeline widget is producing a [object error] message when viewed in IE 7.

Any way you can look into what is causing this?

Love the widget and I'd love to use it. :)

Unknown said...

Hey there, loving the timeline gadget. Speaking as a layperson when it comes to this sort of thing - is there any way to adjust more settings than what is directly offered? I see there are a lot of ways to customize Timelines, but not so much through the gadget..?