Google Apps Hacks

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To help me pick the right in-between colors, I created a reference color gradient between red and

green using a paint program that I referred to as I set up the formatting rules. You can use many

different image editors for this purpose, like Photoshop, PhotoPaint, GIMP, or PaintShop Pro (which

you see in Figure 3-31). You can, of course, simply wing it and not generate a gradient at all.

Now you can select your income data cells and add all the rules you need. Google Spreadsheets

will apply the rst rule it nds to be true, ignoring subsequent ones down the list, so you can simply

dene the rules in the following order, for a result as shown in Figure 3-32:

Greater than 120,000: use light green

Greater than 60,000: use green

Greater than 30,000: use yellow/light orange

Greater than 10,000: use orange

Greater than –1: use red

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Creating a color gradient for your spreadsheet

  - CONVERT CURRENCIES WITHIN YOUR SPREADSHEET

HaCK 29:



Use a little screenscraping magic to convert one currency

into any other.

Google Spreadsheets’ importXml function pulls external web site data into your spreadsheet

. You can use this feature for currency conversion, too.

Suppose that you have a table with payments made to you from a variety of companies, just like the

sample table shown in Figure 3-33. There are three columns: Company