When I think of RSS I usually think of website articles, and the RSS feed specifically as a vehicle to transport the article’s Title, Description, Text, Author, etc. to my computer.

However, an RSS feed can contain any type of data: stock quotes, server stats, weather reports, or even Halo 2 stats from your online gaming.

Sean Alexander plays Halo 2 and subscribes to his stats in an RSS feed. He then maps the RSS feed(XML) to an Excel workbook and creates graphs and pivot tables from it.

Awesome! This is the first example I’ve seen of an RSS data driven spreadsheet. You can read the description of the project here, or check out the tutorial and download the workbook.

Update 12-1-04: It looks like the the spreadsheet was actually designed by a Microsoft Employee who is also an Excel Program Manager.