Maybe I'm missing something. But there is no easy way (if you don't know the conversion) to convert units in Google Spreadsheets. Shouldn't they incorporate the power of the Google Calculator?

It would be nice. Any ideas?

I've tried a =googlelookup("one euro"; "in dollar") and it doesn't work.
Even if it's not so fast to tape this function, it's would be the most institinctive way for Google to implement the feature.

In fact, Google Docs is able to give answers for question that return a result like the one for "barack obama place of birth" or "GOOG" (the stock quote), but not the one returned by the google calculator, the google weather or the google world clock.

This would be cool to expand the Google Lookup function.
I imagine:
- a GPS position for GoogleLookUp("paris"; "location")
- a list of friends for GoogleLookUp("matt cuts"; "friends"), using the social graph api the way the GoogleLoopUp function can bring items from google news
- etc.

The GoogleLoopUp function is so great as all kind of information can be found on the web and as microformats arrive.

Guess whywhy SMBs will shift to Google Docs the day the will be able to get answer for =GoogleLookUp("my competitors", "turnover"). Updated every day.

And what if the Shift + down combination can guess "my competitors"?
Hey, this would be the greatest killer application ever! Bye MS Office! This is I.A or B.I for everyone.

Jared Cherup, very probably someone who wanted to test wether the user accounts are also attached to an IP or alike. [Edit: Test post was deleted – Tony]

J. Flipo
   Such a googlelookup function should provide a format as well, cause there is no way now for the function GoogleLookUp("paris"; "location") to know wether it should give a human readable format or the longitudes and/or the latitudes... but yeah it would be cool if they added such a function, based on some kind of fact database, which could be accessed from the search results as well.

I think it would be great if they added all the wonderful features from Google Calculator.

For example: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS241&q=30+cups+in+cubic+meters&btnG=Search

It turns out that you can do hex/binary <-> number with Google Calculator.
http://mattcutts.com/blog/easy-tip-to-convert-hex-to-decimal/

Actually Jared there's a hack in the upcoming Google Apps Hacks (formerly known as Google Office Hacks :)) where I explain how currency conversion can be done!

The book is not yet published but here's the product link...
http://store.makezine.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=9780596515881

What you can do is utilize Yahoo Finance screenscraping via the Google Spreadsheet importXml function. You can then tie the curreny name to the table header, and have e.g. the two colums "USD | EUR" and then the EUR column will automatically fill to the converted values, using live data! Here's the formula in a nutshell, the whole hack will be in the book – B1 and C1 are the currency column headers ("USD | EUR"):

=importXml("http: //finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=" & B2 & "&from=" & B1 & "&to=" & C1, "//table[class='yfnc_datamodoutline1']//tr[2]//td[5]/b")