If your company, organization or customers are in love with spreadsheets (might be more like a love-hate thing), and you want to more easily integrate other data, services or logic into your spreadsheets, you're in luck. If you're a web software developer looking for simple, collaborative data on the web, you're also in luck.
Using Google spreadsheet gadgets, your programs (html/javascript/flash) can be easily integrated with spreadsheets - either within the spreadsheet itself, or embedded in any web page, where it can access data from a google spreadsheet. Building great re-usable products using this technology is simple - simple enough to make this platform viable even for one-off, custom capabilities. Of course, if the organization you're targeting is a Google Apps user, they'll even be able to use your cool new gadget on their Start Page.
So if you need a specialized, spreadsheet-friendly capability - a special report format, a lookup to an external data source, a custom visualization or chart, a specialized calculation - take a look at spreadsheet gadgets. You might get some ideas of what's possible by looking at some currently available gadgets made by google and other developers.
For example, here's a Gantt Chart Gadget (powered by ViewPath) that’s reading data from a spreadsheet. You or a collaborator could update the underlying spreadsheet - and wham, the Gantt chart is updated. You could even feed that spreadsheet from a form...
Just to prove you can create practically anything, here's a Pile of Money Gadget embedded directly in a spreadsheet to give a vivid representation of cost trade-offs:
...the possiblities are endless. To get started, check out the documentation.
