Users to Become Addicted to Google's Services

As you know, Google is a company that updates its service periodically to improve the functionality and the features offered to users. This time is Google Docs & Spreadsheets' turn to receives some new goodies to attract users.

"As a web application, Google Docs & Spreadsheets can do all sorts of neat things. Of course, easy sharing and collaborative editing are the most obvious benefits, but this young puppy is learning some new tricks (of course, I'll mention the two closest to my heart first)," John Danaher, Software Engineer in Google's NYC office, started a post on the official blog.

"One is GoogleLookup, which attempts to answer your questions by using information from the web. You can use it for all kinds of party tricks, like looking up the population of New York City [=GoogleLookup("New York City", "population")] or when Google was founded [=googlelookup("google", "founded")]. Try it to see what other things you can look up.

I'll warn you in advance, it's a bit addicting. If you hover your mouse over the cell, you'll see links to the source pages where we found the data, so you can always check out the primary sources. And don't forget you can copy/paste (ctrl-c / ctrl-v) the formula to other cells to easily have a bunch of GoogleLookups in a sheet. Don't expect to change the world with this function, but we'll still have fun with it.

While GoogleLookup covers a little bit of everything, its sibling GoogleFinance focuses just on financial data from Google Finance. Using a similar syntax, you can look up the price of Google stock [=GoogleFinance("GOOG")] or the 52-week high of Apple [=GoogleFinance("AAPL", "HIGH52")].

And since stock prices tend to change more often than, say, the capital of California does, we update them in your spreadsheet automatically. So if you leave your portfolio spreadsheet open, you should see numbers get updated as you would on Google Finance itself. Of course, we also have the same 20-minute delay on financial data," he added.

"Besides a few other handy small features, there's one more worth mentioning: revisions. If you (or one of your 'trusted collaborators') make a mistake in a spreadsheet which our usually-friendly autosave feature picks up, you can go back to prior versions of your spreadsheet using the "Revisions" tab. That'll come in handy, I promise," the Google employee ended his post.

So, if you're interested in how Google Docs & Spreadsheets works, don't be afraid to test these new features and, if something goes wrong, you can send Google some feedback to help the company repair the problems.