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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

What are the data sources? Can I source from SQL Server, Oracle, DB2? OLAP engines? If not, while still better than nothing, not really a first class solution for most of my users. But great for soccer moms (seriously -- our team mom will flex on you with pivot tables for the soccer team).

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Erm, it's a spreadsheet program, so the data source is your spreadsheet. So if you can get your SQL data into a Google Spreadsheet, you can make a pivot table out of it.

Excel can access other data stores such as databases using ODBC.

You can import public JSON/XML/CSV/HTML(and other) data.

You can connect/import private stuff with the Secure Data Connector, though I don't know all the types supported.

http://code.google.com/securedataconnector/docs/1.3/overview...

You can get everything out w/the API, too.

Yah, it totally doesn't target the 0.1% of people who do this! HOW LAME IS GOOGLE WITH THEIR FREE-TO-USE SOFTWARE!?!?!

In all seriousness, this is much more useful than to just soccer moms.

pivot table is probably the most interesting interface to BI cubes, I've hardly seen them used elsewhere!

so i can't really agree on your assumption that "other data sources" would represent 0.1%, in most business places i would say "other data sources" represent 100% of the usage

Free online tools to do pivot tables on spreadsheet data. Sounds like small business to me. People who already have their data in spreadsheets and don't want to hire a BI engineer to install SQL, Analysis Services, construct cubes, reports etc etc

Not true at all. I could trade anecdotes but pivot tables are an essential tool in the analyst toolkit, without requiring external data.

Great opportunity for someone to develop and share a standard spreadsheet for capturing and reporting usefully on iTunes appstore data.

A bit of an aside, but because something is free does not mean it is above criticism nor does it mean you can't bitch about things it doesn't do.

There's a number of ways to get data in and out of Google Docs to sync with enterprise services. Start with the Docs API and Google Apps Script API.

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