Subtitle this post: I am easily amused.
Often I keep track of planned participation in events for our Indian Guides tribe, the Iroquois, using a Google Docs spreadsheet. My use of spreadsheets and especially charts has become a running joke within our group. Normally our group uses Google Groups to communicate. It provides a simple means to communicate with everyone at once. However, while serving as chief last year, I found that the messages from our Google Group did not always get the attention they deserved. I finally settled on using MailChimp as a way to send messages that had a little more visual appeal, some personalization and to give me some feedback on who had opened the message so I would know who needed a phone call.
This past week while drumming up support for the Encinitas Holiday Parade
I stumbled on a little bit of synchronicity when combining my Google Docs Spreadsheets with MailChimp. Someone humorously requested a pie chart in response to the link to the roster spreadsheet. After creating the acceptable pie chart in my spreadsheet I selected the publish link to get a link to the image. I then duplicated my earlier MailChimp campaign and modified the message to include the pie chart.
What happened next brought a smile to my face. When I received the message, gmail recognized the pie chart was coming from a Google Docs spreadsheet and offered me a preview of the spreadsheet. That in turn made me realize that the pie chart included in the mail message was dynamic and would update every time the mail message was opened, essentially converting the email message into a quick status indicator for the tribe. As I said at the beginning, I am easily amused, but isn’t technology wonderful?
One little bit of darkness in all this joy, you must have access to the spreadsheet to view the pie chart. I have thought of two possible workarounds for this. The first would be to create a public spreadsheet with no personal information that is somehow synced with the protected spreadsheet. The second would be to supply a static pie chart image to use if the first image is not available. And of course those people who have chosen to receive the text version of my emails are just plain out of luck.