Computer Friendly Spreadsheets for Sharing

One of the important aspects of sharing data is creating a format that is sharing friendly. A topic that frequently comes up at FortiusOne is bad spreadsheets.

If you are going to share a spreadsheet there are a couple ways to make it easier for those involved. Developers usually think of spreadsheets are more of a database table, there are others that think of them as reports. Spreadsheets have a place in both situations. If it is meant to be a report, by all means make it a report. If you are recording data to share out make it more like a table. If people are going to mashup your data and input it into various systems the table version is much less of a headache. So what does it mean to make your spreadsheet table-like?

You only have one set of columns in each page. Each column can have a header and probably should unless you are handing out metadata with your document, but sometimes metdata gets seperated from its data so that is not ideal. No columns should be merged anywhere in the page, each column should be the same width all the way down.

Hard to Ingest Spreadsheet

Easy to Ingest Spreadsheet

Don’t be afraid to share your data if you have the “Bad Spreadsheet” we still want it. Though when deciding what format to record you data in please keep the “Good Spreadsheet” in mind. Depending on your technical expertise another option is to keep your data in the “Good Spreadsheet” and create a report from it.

Following these tips will not only help you upload into GeoCommons, but also help you share with others that want to create mashups.