Google Doc is a good way to share/manage documents between you and your colleagues, but sometime you want to directly access the data in terminal (e.g. bash) or in program (e.g. R), without downloading the data first.

For example, I have a Google Spreadsheet here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0At2sqNEgxTf3dEt5SXBTemZZM1gzQy1vLVFNRnludHc

I want to open it in R or select some of columns in bash. Here are the tips for that.

Step1: publish the tab you want to access to the web [howto], in format of CVS or TXT (which is a tab-delimited file actually)

Step2: copy the published URL. At the end, you will see “&output=txt” part for output format, and “&gid=0” to indicate which tab to access (if you have multiple tab, specify tab number here, which starts from 0).

Step3: To access the file externally. Done.

For example, to access the 1st and 3rd columns in bash:

wget –no-check-certificate -q -O – ‘https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0At2sqNEgxTf3dEt5SXBTemZZM1gzQy1vLVFNRnludHc&single=true&gid=0&output=txt’ | cut -f1,3

In R,

covarianceTableURL=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0At2sqNEgxTf3dEt5SXBTemZZM1gzQy1vLVFNRnludHc&single=true&gid=0&output=txt”
require(RCurl)
covarianceTable=read.table(textConnection(getURL(covarianceTableURL)))