Microsoft has recently released Excel Mashup, a web based service to create rich and interactive data mashups. A SkyDrive account is required, as it is used to store the workbooks. Web developers can then make use of the JavaScript Api to create the mashups and embed them on their web sites.

Microsoft has made available several demo applications that demonstrate the functionality of Excel Mashup.

Destination Explorer for instance displays weather or visitor information for a city or park in regions of the world. The data is visualized both with charts and on Bing Maps.

How healthy was your meal today on the other hand displays a persons meal’s calorie intake in detail. Adjustments can be made and the data entered is compared to the recommended intake for male or female adults with a sedentary or active lifestyle.

The basic idea behind Excel Mashup is to give developers the ability to publish rich interactive applications using Excel data on the web.

The whole process has been divided into three steps. First the sign up, then the embedding of the workbook on a self-hosted web page and finally the creation of rich data mashups using the Excel Services JavaScript library.

Development examples are available on the website. One of the examples walks developers through the creation of the Destination Explorer application. JavaScript and HTML skills are required to follow the guide.

Developers find links to all three APIs on the web page as well.

Microsoft Analytics for Twitter is such a tool. Well, it basically is an Excel 2010 spreadsheet that everyone can use to pull data from Twitter. Before you jump in joy you need to know that it requires Microsoft’s free PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010, a 81 to 112 Megabyte download. I recommend to start downloading PowerPivot first, and during the download the Microsoft Analytics for Twitter installer.

The analytics Excel spreadsheet is placed on the computer desktop. All you need to do is to run it after installation of both required components.

The top offers a search form where you can enter up to five different search queries that you want analyzed.

Once you have entered the search terms, you click the search button to pull the data from Twitter. A small window is shown that displays the progress of that operation. Once that is finished, ou need to click on PowerPivot in the top menu and select Update All from the options there. This triggers a new window where some updating takes place. Close or minimize the window once that is completed.

Switch to the Data menu in Excel and select Update All. This updates the current spreadsheet with the new data set. You see an example of that display above on the screenshot.

The spreadsheet contains lots of information, from top hashtags over tweets by day or time of day to top mentions, top tweeters and the original and retweet ratio.

The information are great for comparing different topics, or for analyzing a single search term instead. This way you could see when people twitter about a certain topic, who writes about it the most and which hash tags are the most popular in the conversations.

It is worth installing the PowerPivot plugin for Excel? That depends. If you want to use the information presented for research or marketing, then probably yes, if you are curious, then probably yes as well. The information are presented in a way that makes it great for presentations for instance. I personally will use it to get a better picture of people who post messages about Ghacks on Twitter.

You can download Microsoft Analytics for Twitter from the official Microsoft Download page of the Excel spreadsheet. (via)

All that needs to be done to map the locations is to paste the spreadsheet information into the form on the Batchgeo website. The online service will automatically use the first row as identifiers which means that users need to make sure that it contains those. Identifiers such as zip, address or city need to be linked to the right columns in case the automatic detection does not do that correctly.

Batchgeo creates a Google Map with the location of the spreadsheet displayed on the map. It is then possible to save, print and share the map that has been created, download Google Earth KML data or download the geocoding results again.

All Google Maps view modes are available (map, satellite, hybrid and terrain).

There does not seem to be an option to directly embed the mapped information on a website, only to create a static url on the batchgeo website. The blog mentioned a button to create the embed code but the button is nowhere to be found on the site.

Batchgeo can be a handy program, especially for users who need to create a map from location information stored in a spreadsheet.

Google adds columns to the spreadsheet that differ depending on the search term. A search for people for example will reveal names, images, descriptions and their dates of birth and death with the option to add new suggested columns at the end of the spreadsheet which can include notable ideas, main interests or schools / interests. A search for metal on the other hand reveals information about the density, cas number, melting point, atomic number or crystal system.

Google Squared is therefor an interesting option when researching information that can be grouped. The conventional way of looking up all American Presidents would be to either perform a search on a search engine and look at the first results that come up or directly visit an encyclopedia like Wikipedia for the information. Most result pages however contain additional text and it is up to the researcher to find the right information.

There is however on problem associated with Google Squared which makes the concept prone to error: There is no quality control. Google Squared fetches information from all over the web which can lead to errors. Take a look at the results in the picture above. The spreadsheet tells us that the philosopher Plato was born on November 7, 1964. A click on that specific entry displays additional birth days including 424-423 BC of Wikipedia. Plato’s birth year taken from Wikipedia’s is however marked as low confidence data in this case.

While it is easy to spot such obvious flaws it becomes more difficulty. Who can say that the density of Platinum is really 21.45, that the maximum speed of the German WWII tank destroyer Jagdpanther was indeed 46 km/h or that Saturn’s orbital period is 29.46 years.

This means that it is always advised to find at least one additional source of information that backs up the information presented by Google Squared.

Update: Google Squared has been discontinued.

Hidden data can have severe consequences for the sender or his company. Sendshield provides examples of companies who forgot to remove hidden data and the consequences that it had. You find examples for companies like Google, Merck, Microsoft (oh the irony) and the United Nations.

Sendshield acts as a proxy that analyzes every Office document, Word, Excel or Powerpoint, that is attached in Microsoft Outlook. It warns the user that the document contains hidden data and provides a convenient way to remove the data.

A red warning sign and a line appear beneath the attachments of that email which opens a new window that is displaying in depth information about the hidden data in the document(s). The user has the option to remove the data on a individual entry basis or all at once.

This process does not change the original document in any way which is a benefit of using Sendshield instead of manually editing the document.