Fusion tables are part of Google Apps available on Google Drive.
It allows you to work with a flat database file.
The data can be imported from a Google Spreadsheet, a CSV file or imported from publicly available data.
The data in a fusion table can be visualized using pie charts, bar charts, line plots, scatter plots, timelines and geographic maps
Using Public Data
To create a fusion table, you can search for publicly available data and import the data into a Fusion Table.
Personal Note:
My experience shows that importing the table from a Google Sheet or csv file works better than importing the data directly into the fusion table
Exercise #1
We are going to work the List of the 100 largest municipalities in Canada by population. It is a list that is available on Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia site allow the data to be resorted by any field (column), however the data can not be summarized. By importing the table into a fusion table, the data can be summary and displayed visually to extract more information from the data.
Importing the data into a fusion table
In Google Drive, Create a new Fusion Table
choose the Or search public data tables option
In the search box enter: List of the 100 largest municipalities in Canada by population
choose the link with Show less (101 rows / 11 columns total) - Export data
Click on Export data, choose to Export to Google Sheets
Add Summaries to determine each of the following:
The population of each province in 2011
The land area used by each Census subdivision of each Province