Google Spreadsheets is a great, and very useful tool. Seems almost obvious nowadays, but there was a time when no one believed it was even possible to create a decent spreadsheet application that would run in the browser. In particular, the ability to collaborate in realtime is a truly killer feature that opens the door to all kinds of interesting possibilities that involve sharing datasets and creating low-cost (read: makeshift) in-house tools such as dashboards and reports.

Everything today has an API, which makes it an incredible time to be a programmer. At your fingertips, theoretically, is the ability to automate, orchestrate, synchronize data of all sorts into containers and formats of all sorts.

Reality is, however, that this theoretically simple process is often quite gruesome. Often times trying to pull some data off an API involves trying to piece together a complete picture of how a service works from very fragmented documentation. Being mainstream as it is, I was surprised at how missing the documentation for Spreadsheets API is. To help get you started, I’ve put some demo code on github along with some helper functions I wrote to do some common tasks. The installation script will guide you through the red-tape on Google’s side.

Hope you find it useful, you can find it at https://github.com/rotemtam/google-spreadsheet-python-example

Feel free to contact me on twitter @rotemtam if you need any help.