Experimenting with Google Spreadsheets

I spent a bit of time today playing around with Google Spreadsheets to see what I could do with embeded charts. Below you’ll find two charts drawing from a spreadsheet I’ve created to track my energy usage (natural gas and electricity). I’m using a Google chart gadget to grab the data from the spreadsheet and display it.

Some observations about my energy usage:

• My electricity usage varies the most (use of the air conditioner in the summer), but the cost per kWH stays relatively constant.
• My gas usage varies less than my electricity usage, but the cost per CCF varies quite a bit.

A couple observations about the embedded charts, mostly for me:

• The embed code lets you change most of the settings directly in html, if you can stand reading through a lot of %xx codes.
• Any changes I make to the gadget on the spreadsheet sheet, do not get automagically propagated through to the charts embedded here. :( This is related to the changing those settings above, they’re hard coded into the embed code)
• To extend the X-axis, date range, change the value of C15 to Cxx.
• It does take a bit of time for the gadget to update, I’m not quite sure what the update delay is.