Jim Pick

Accessing Google Docs Spreadsheet Data Using the GData API

February 27th, 2009

I have put together a short screencast to demonstrate how to access the data inside a Google Docs spreadsheet using Google’s GData REST API.

This past Monday, Darren Barefoot announced on Twitter “Let’s assemble a database of Vancouver tech scene people on Twitter: http://tr.im/gHHS. Please retweet!”

Within a day, over 180 people had used the form to add their names to the spreadsheet. Very cool!

This is the same type of information I’m collected for the Vancouver Freebase site. So naturally, I would like to synchronize the data. Instead of copying and pasting the data out of Google Docs, I was wondering if there was a programmatic way to access the data. As it turns out, there is GData API for accessing Spreadsheet data.

You can test drive the API using Google’s OAuth Playground. I put together a short HOWTO with an example of how to extract some sample data.

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