The joy of Google Docs and Gadgets
I've had a huge amount of fun in my recent holidays fooling around with Google Docs and Google Gadgets which are incredibly powerful tools for journalists.
The most amazing discovery was the importhtml function within Google Docs which allows you to scrape web content on the fly and bring it into Google Docs to have some fun with it.
I did a Wikipedia search for the highest grossing films of all time and then used the importhtml function to pull that info into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I spent a few minutes cleaning up the info and then applied it to the Google Gadget which allows you to represent this information in a pyramid. Below is the result.
Now, I know this is not going to win me any awards but I think it's quite an effective example of how a complete non-designer and journalist like myself can generate acceptable web info-graphics on the fly using nothing other than free Google tools.
