RSS feeds are everywhere. So much that you cannot avoid them in your data processing, analytics or day to day spreadsheet needs.

If you can get the RSS feeds to excel sheet you can do pretty interesting things with it, like:

• Prepare a sheet to watch deals on Amazon, Craigslist, Deals2buy and other favorite sites
• Watch news, alerts on your company / brand / blog using technorati, google news etc.
• So much more, just use your imagination

Of course, Excel 2003 (and above) has XML import option using which you can get any XML files (and thus RSS files too) and show them in spreadsheet. But the problem is, the layout is messy, and too confusing. So here is a simpler way to read RSS/ATOM/XML feeds from excel sheets.

For this example, let us build an excel sheet that will fetch Amazon Gold box Today’s deals RSS feed show all deal titles and product URLs.

1. First Create a new Google Docs - Spreadsheet

   We will use a round about way to get RSS feed to our excel sheet. Create a new google docs - spreadsheet. We will now use google’s importfeed() external data function. This function fetches external feed data and loads it in to the spreadsheet. We will write this function in 2 columns, one for the feed title telling us what the goldbox deal is about and another with the product’s URL.

   The syntax will look like: =ImportFeed("http://rssfeeds.s3.amazonaws.com/goldbox", "items title",true,20) for deal title and =ImportFeed("http://rssfeeds.s3.amazonaws.com/goldbox", "items url",true,20) for the URL.

   When done, the sheet should display gold box deals like below:

   

2. Now share the google doc as text file to access from excel sheet

   Once the feed is fetched to the google doc, we will share this sheet as a txt file so that we can read the gold box deals from excel.

   You can share the google doc by clicking “Publish” option available to the right.

   We will select the “more publishing options” to share this sheet as a txt file. Click here to see a sample shared txt file containing latest 20 gold box deals.

   Make sure you have clicked on the “Automatically republish this document when changes are made” option.

3. Finally read the text file from excel using web queries

   In the excel sheet we will create a new web query to connect to our shared text file using menu > data > import external data > new web query as shown below:

   

   We will mention the URL of the shared google doc in the web query dialog and select everything. See below:

   

   That is all, we have now fed our excel sheet with tasty gold box deals. When you need new deals just “refresh data”

   download the excel sheet with rss feeds to spreadsheet example and play around

Do you like this? Tell me what would you do if you get RSS feeds to excel sheets?

• 9 Comments

Wow, this is totally cool. A great lesson in creating buzz.

The folks at windows vista wanted to convince people that Vista is indeed a good operating system and upgradable from XP. But there are lot of bad opinions floating around and end users are more or less confused about it. Personally I have rarely used Vista and my opinion on it (which incidentally is as bad as XP) comes from reading various blogs / review sites and comments. And this is the problem they choose to tackle in the Project Mojave.

They took a bunch of common computer users (thus you will find very few college going kids, artists in the experiment) and asked them about their opinion on Vista. They all go like, “it crashes”, “it is worse”, “not for me” …. Then the folks at Mojave Experiment told them about this “brand new windows operating system” called Windows Mojave. They told them to try it on, and the reactions were mind-blowing, everybody is like, “wow this is totally cool”, “oh! you can do that ?!?”, “this is amazing”. And then they tell that Mojave is indeed Vista in disguise.

Pretty cool way to tell people to “see for yourself, decide for yourself”.

Read more on Scoble

PS: for some reason I cant embed this video, pretty uncool for a viral

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Here is a quick round up of excel posts from few of the awe some blogs around the web:

At PTS Blog, Jon provides excellent tutorial on adding target lines to your bar charts to show target vs. actual performance. He has several other tweaks for your category axis as well, just read the other posts there.

At Contextures Blog, Debra teaches us how to simplify data entry with auto correct in Office 2007 apps. So if you are the kind who would use lots of acronyms, you can use this feature to expand them and do much more. The example she has shown is for Word 2007 but it should work the same way in Microsoft excel 2007

At Jorge Cameo’s Charts, he gives few more reasons why upgrading to Excel 2007 may not be such a good idea. Personally I use excel 2003 on my office comp and Google docs - spreadsheets at home.

Finally, Nathan at Flowing data shares insights from his experiment to modify a mediocre chart. Most of the examples are based on Excel, go take a look at them to get some pretty cool charting ideas.

Also see:

• Excel Links Around the Web [July 22]
• Cool Infographics / Charts of the Week [July 24]

Did you see some interesting excel articles / links recently, share them in comments

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What is your favorite keyboard shortcut / productivity tip?

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When I was in school we had a maths teacher named BVN. He used to teach advanced math (like trigonometry, calculus) for class 7 onwards. We used to fear him a lot because he is the strictest of them all. Finally when I got to seventh I met him as a teacher. And boy, he is one of the persons to change my life. He inspired me learn math like no other, he is the one who showed me how to work with computers (with those big 5¼ floppy disks and BASIC). I liked him so much that during my tenth class I even played his role during teacher’s day (It is the birthday of the second President of India, academic philosopher Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan. It is considered a “celebration” day, on this day, the responsibility of teaching is taken up by the senior students as an appreciation for their teachers. more)

I met many more wonderful teachers during rest of my life, Prof. Kuldeep and Prof. Ram Kumar at IIM Indore, Prof. Seetharamaiah during my engineering days and of course my grand mother, who is probably my very first teacher in life and school. People to whom I am always thankful.

One excellent quality all these people share is, they all taught me to be passionate. They all told me to give everything for stuff I care about. They told me to question. And that is the most valuable lesson any teacher can impart on you.

I couldn’t help but remembering all those wonderful teachers in my life when I saw the Randy Pausch’s the last lecture. He is a professor at CMU famous for his contributions to Virtual Reality and HCI. When he learned about his critical health condition due to pancreatic cancer, he chose to deliver “last lecture”, a talk to impart his life’s learnings to students and inspire them.

If you haven’t seen this lecture, please watch it. It is really inspirational.

Who are the most inspirational teachers in your life?

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Here is a quick Monday tip for data junkies.

If you want to shuffle a list of numbers or cells in excel in random order you can do that with “data > sort” menu option of excel.

• First insert a column next to the list you want to shuffle and enter random numbers in each cell in using =rand(). See below:
• Now select the entire list and sort it by the new column with random numbers. (Menu > data > sort)
• If you want a fresh set of shuffled list, just hit f9 (recalculates all formulas) and sort again

Like this? Also learn how to sort horizontally, fill only weekdays while auto-filling dates

• 4 Comments

Dear Microsoft (and other guys who design software that can be used to write something):

Blog is a real word, just like bog or bloc or blot or blow or blob. So please add it to your esteemed dictionaries and stop harassing everyone with the wiggly red lines. Of course you can blame me for not “add to dictionary”ing the word, but then, what is a Friday with little restlessness

• 1 Comment