Have you ever collaborated? Google Spreadsheets is fantastic to collaborate with. Rather than sending excel spreadsheets backwards and forwards, I would rather use shared Google Spreadsheets. I do not want the intermediate step of exporting a Google Spreadsheet as an xls file. I do not know how to make use of the Google Spreadsheet API (http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/overview.html) but from the little knowledge that I have I can see that this would be the way to enable R to talk to Google. How much work would it be for this to be incorporated into RODBC? Google Spreadsheets has some phenomenal functionality that uses Google Search engine to populate the columns in a spreadsheet with data. Can you imagine the power of using the Spreadsheet to get the data and R to merge it with ones own research data and then analyze the merged data. Check this http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/11/connecting-data-using-google.html -- Farrel Buchinsky