Pizza in Gainesville, Florida

The map above is generated by this "live" Google spreadsheet. Change the spreadsheet -- the map changes (almost) instantly.

Instructions are here.

That might be a little taxing, so this might help. At least you will know an easy way to get the latitude and longitude.

What you might not realize is that you can merge information from numerous cells -- along with formatting tags, such as the <br /> tag to create a line-break -- into one single cell by using the CONCATENATE formula in a spreadsheet. Ahhh ... So the last column in my spreadsheet is labeled "Descrip," and it's actually a formula cell. This is what that cell contains:

=CONCATENATE(E2, "<br />", F2, "<br />", "(", J2, ") ", K2, "<br />", "<b>Rating: </b>", I2)

To make the same thing happen in all cells in the column, you grab the lower right corner of the topmost data cell and drag it all the way down. (This is the same as Excel.) Each cell's own row information is automatically substituted for the specifics of the top row -- that is, E2 becomes E3 in the third row, and F2 becomes F3.

Okay, you're wondering how I got the little pizza slices, aren't you?

I used a combination of the above and a naming device; that is, the GIF image of five slices is named pizza5.gif, and the GIF image of four slices is named pizza4.gif. This enables the person who updates the spreadsheet to simply type in the rating (1, 2, 3, 4 or 5) and the correct number of slices will appear -- because of the name of the image file:

=CONCATENATE(E2, "<br />", F2, "<br />", "(", J2, ") ", K2, "<br />", "<b>Rating: </b>", "<img src='images/pizza", I2, ".gif' />")

Mindy McAdams | University of Florida