GoogleLookup Gives Us Another Reason to Use (and Love) Google Docs

ReadWriteWeb pointed us to a nifty function on Google Spreadsheets that we hadn’t used before: GoogleLookup, which essentially turns your spreadsheet cells into Google search boxes. To use it, you simply enter this formula into a cell on your spreadsheet:

Syntax: =GoogleLookup(”entity”; “attribute”)

where “entity” stands for the name of any subject/item you want information about (i.e. a famous person like Audrey Hepburn; a city like Taipei; a chemical compound like Isopropyl Alcohol) and “attribute” refers to the type of imformation you are trying to retrieve (like Hepburn’s date of birth; Taipei’s population; or the melting point of Isopropyl Alcohol).

So for example, entering this into your cell:

=GoogleLookup (”China”; “internet users”)

would yield “123 million (2006)”

In the Office Live Workspace vs Google Docs debate on RWW, Commentator Jrome offers further items that you can easily access information on with GoogleLookup:

Countries and Territories (like “Burkina Faso”): population, capital, largest city, gdp
U.S. States (like “Tennessee”): area, governor, nickname, flower
Rivers (like “Amazon River”): origin, length
Cities and Towns (like “Chicago”): state, mayor, elevation
Musicians (like “John Lennon”): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
Baseball Players (like “Wade Boggs”): games, at bats, earned run average, position
Chemical Elements (like “Helium”): atomic number, discovered by, atomic weight
Chemical Compounds (like “Isopropyl Alcohol”): chemical formula, melting point, boiling point, density
Stars (like “Betelgeuse”): constellation, distance, mass, temperature
Planets (like “Saturn”): number of moons, length of day, distance from sun, atmosphere
Dinosaurs (like “Velociraptor”): height, weight, when it lived
Ships (like “USS Chesapeake”): length, displacement, complement, commissioned
Companies (like “Hewlett-Packard”): employees, ceo, ticker

And besides GoogleLookup, we can think of a few more reasons why we’re not in any rush to switch to Office Live Workspace (maybe the biggest being that you can’t use it to edit or create documents without using Office or other compatible software) - even with Microsoft’s $100,000 sweepstakes ploy.

ReadWriteWeb: Comment of the Day: GoogleLookup is “Wow”