Little Trick, Big Numbers

I often want to know just a bit more about numbers I see in tables. As I was looking at some thing today, I stumbled on the Wikipedia page for “List of Most Viewed YouTube Videos“. After being more than a bit amazed at the utterly staggering numbers. I wanted to know what they translated to in terms of years because the numbers were just too big.

I remembered that Google Spreadsheets will let you pull in a table from a website with no fuss. All I needed to do was put =IMPORTHTML(“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_viewed_YouTube_videos”,”table”,1) in the first cell on the spreadsheet and viola the table is transcluded. I can now add a few more calculations to figure out the import stuff – like how many years worth of time have been spent watching Gangnam Style (16,274.24 years for the record¹). You can go mess around with the data here.