I wanted to pass on this question. How does one go about converting lat long cells in a spreadsheet of this format...

Location Latitude Longitude
Aimere -8.84372 120.85683
Ao Wao 6.62278 99.6825
Bagamo -6.44005 38.90954
etc.

... into a KML file for use in Google Maps (or find some other way to display in Google Maps)?

Well, I found two approaches, http://earth.google.com/outreach/tutorial_mapper.html and http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/spreadsheetsmapwizard/makecustommap.htm and I tried one and it worked, but it also seems kind of overkill for such a simple spreadsheet. Ideally one would figure this could be done with a gadget included in the spreadsheet (or perhaps as a Yahoo Pipe?).

You can use the maps gadget from Spreadsheets. The first column should include lat/lon separated by a comma and the second column could include the location's name.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pLaE9tsVLp_2dp0ppcPGnZw

Ionut, that's pretty cool. Does it work with City/State names or State/Country names too?