Reading data from the new version of Google Spreadsheets by Andrie de Vries.
From the post:
Spreadsheets remain an important way for people to share and work with data. Among other providers, Google has provided the ability to create online spreadsheets and other documents.
Back in 2009, David Smith posted a blog entry on how to use R, and specifically the XML package to import data from a Google Spreadsheet. Once you marked your Google sheet as exported, it took about two lines of code to import your data into a data frame.
But things have changed
More recently, it seems that Google changed and improved the Spreadsheet product. Google's own overview of changes lists some changes, but one change isn't on this list. In the previous version, it was possible to publish a sheet as a csv file. In the new version it is still possible to publish a sheet, but the ability to do this as csv is no longer there.
On April 5, 2014 somebody asked a question on StackOverflow on how to deal with this.
Because I had the same need to import data from a spreadsheet shared in our team, I set out to find and answer.
…
Deep problems require a lot of time to solve but you feel productive after having solved them.
Solving shallow problems that eat up nearly as much time as deep ones, not so much.
Posts like this one can save you from re-inventing a solution or scouring the web for one, if not both.
File this under Google spreadsheets, extraction.