Embedding a Google Docs spreadsheet in Blogger

Blogger is an excellent free blogging platform but if you want anything 'dynamic' then it starts to get in the way. One thought I've had recently was to see how I could share information captured in Google Docs Spreadsheet with Blogger.

I've a few ideas which will take a few posts to explain, so let's start with the most basic - embedding a Google Spreadsheet direct into Blogger.

Access the spreadsheet in Google Docs that you want to expose in Blogger, I've chosen a simple table of the most popular programming languages in 2010:

Next you'll want to share this spreadsheet with the rest of the world by publishing it as a web page:

Now you need to select the "HTML to embed in a page" option and copy the HTML code into the clipboard:

 Open a new post in blogger and ensure that the "Edit HTML" tab is selected and paste the code in:

Now publish your post and your spreadsheet will be visable in your blog post:



I didn't say it would be pretty though did I? ;)

That's the most basic way of doing it, and any changes you make in Google Docs will be reflected in the Blogger page. In the next few posts I'll show how a little HTML & JavaScript coding with Google Visualisations means we can have a much neater looking table as well as access to producing some graphs of the data.