Want spreadsheet filtering? Try this.

Posted by: Alex Komoroske, Intern - Google Docs & Spreadsheets team

When I joined the Google spreadsheets team in New York City as a Product Manager intern this summer, I let on to the fact that I loved to do programming on the side. My manager's eyes lit up and before I knew it he introduced me to the Google Spreadsheets API. He showed me a quick and (very) dirty javascript program he had written that would allow spreadsheet users to filter their view of a spreadsheet--that is, to view only rows that met some simple criteria. His code wasn't quite bloggable, so he invited me to make a 'real' spreadsheet filter application.

The API gave me access to practically all my spreadsheet data, so I had the flexibility to do whatever I had in mind. Within a few hours, I had a pretty powerful little application that could filter using easy dropdowns on each column. But I wasn't done -- I wanted more control over filtering. I added an expression parser that understands "fuzzy" filters -- things like "contains North or New" -- just as well as it understands more precise (but intimidating) traditional expressions.

I clearly went a little overboard with my spreadsheet application, but the point is that the API puts a lot of power into my hands--and yours. If you've got any kind of programming experience, why don't you give it a try ?