I want to turn my Google Docs spreadsheet of a route into something prettier with photos and stats - how to do it easily?

August 12, 2009 2:51 PM

I want to turn my Google Docs spreadsheet of a route into something prettier with photos and stats - how to do it easily?

I went on a long urban hike with a bunch of people. We twittered, photographed, and geo-located our way through 40 miles of city streets. I planned the route on a spreadsheet beforehand, broken down turn-by-turn, with landmarks and notes. Afterwards, I downloaded our tweets - which were made at each landmark - as a CSV file and added them to the original spreadsheet, giving us location and exact time info. I also added columns for tweets to us. Now, I want to be able to put the pictures (which are time-stamped and/or geotagged) in, as well as notes and free-form information, like clickable URLS, or additional about the places we passed. I want to make this into an online presentation, or something similar, but I want the ability to retain and remanipulate the raw data so that I can remove fields/columns and use it again, as I would a spreadsheet. I'm a Mac user, and the Bento database program does this well and easily - but that's about all it does well. It can't, won't, and shall not export except as a CSV file. Period. Useless.

Any ideas of a quick and easy front end that can take all this info and make it pretty, while retaining the flexibility I get with a Google spreadsheet?

posted by soulbarn to computers & internet (3 answers total)

Is there a reason that you could not just copy and paste into successive Keynote windows and go from there? Granted, it's slow, but it works.
posted by megatherium at 6:21 PM on August 13, 2009

You could try presenting all your information on a map, rather than in a spreadsheet. This would certainly make it prettier.

Platial and Zeemaps accept CSV uploads, whilst Google's Spreadsheet Mapper allows you to copy and paste in all your data at once.

You'll need to add lattitude/longitudes for all your landmarks, but you can find these fairly easily with something like batchgeocode.com
posted by James Scott-Brown at 2:59 AM on August 19, 2009

Alternatively, CommunityWalk will allow you to upload up to 500 markers form a spreadsheet, and doesn't force you to geocode everything - it lets you use free-form addresses.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 3:03 AM on August 19, 2009