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Two colleagues approached me last summer with an intriguing pitch: They wanted to trace the meat, poultry and other food served in school cafeterias all the way back to their manufacturers. Parents, they said, were often in the dark about the quality of the food their kids eat at school — much less who supplies it — and they suspected school officials didn't know enough about the foods' sources to act when students fell ill.

The overdose death of a 15-year-old suburban girl was front-page news in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Maddie Kiefer had been dumped, dead or nearly dead, in the front yard of a friend’s home on a chilly Sunday morning.

The shock expressed by the community, including the more than 1,000 mourners at Kiefer’s funeral, made us want to know what led to her death. But we also had a larger question: Just how common was it for people to overdose and die not from heroin or cocaine, but from prescription drugs?

NOTE: This tutorial assumes a basic familiarity with the Python language and interpreter, an interactive environment for running code. It also requires Python 2.6 or later.

As a database editor, my daily routine often involves pulling data from spreadsheets and databases and processing it for a variety of other tasks: automated email alerts, visualizations, mashups with data from other sources.

I had long suspected that the Clean Air Act was not only being routinely violated in Indiana, but that those violations were rarely being punished. Proving that suspicion, however, seemed impossible — until I read The New York Times’ Sept. 12, 2009, piece about violations of the Clean Water Act. The interactive graphic that accompanied the story linked to an U.S.

Here’s how to use Google Spreadsheets to import RSS and ATOM data.

ImportFeed for RSS and ATOM

All sorts of data gets pushed out as RSS/ATOM feeds. You can put those in spreadsheets too. The command takes the following form:

In this guide, we're going to walk through the process of scraping and cleaning data from the web in real time, using only Google Spreadsheets. As an example, I'll be using Columbia 911, a site I put together for this purpose.