One good example I tried is getting the 2008 Beijing Olympics Overall Medal Standing, my goal is to have a list of medal standing that is updated regularly.

The source data is from http://en.beijing2008.cn/ medal standing page

Getting the data
Open up blank/new sheet on your google docs, and on the first cell put this =ImportHtml("http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/INF/GL/95A/GL0000000.shtml", "table",2).

ImportHtml is a Google function that retrieves info from an HTML file. The first parameter is the URL of source data, the second parameter indicate that we are going to get a table format, and the last parameter is the index of the query format, in our case the 2nd table from the source html.

Formating the data
In some cases, the result doesn’t replicate the exact column of the source table most, especially those with colspan that could be the merged cells in spreadsheet, so we are going format it to our own liking and in my case I only want to output the list of countries with their rankings, total golds, silvers, bronze, and their overall total medals. Some regular spreadsheet functions will do the job for formatting.

Generating codes to embed
After formatting, publish the sheet by going to “Publish” tab. Check the “Automatically re-publish when changes are made” so it will always updated when the source data gets updated. Click “More publishing options” this will pop up a new window, and from there select “HTML to embed in a webpage” from the File format option, then click on Generate URL button to generate the html code we need.

The Result: