What are the refresh characteristics of the Google Spreadsheet Import functions?

Question

The imported data is not always up to date with the source pages when I load the spreadsheet. When this happens, F5 refresh does not help. Nor does Ctl-F5. Apparently there is some kind of caching going on.

I'm thinking that they may be limiting the URL fetches when I try to refresh too often - like when I'm actively modifying my spreadsheet.

Doc reference: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=75507

Answer 1

As per this Google Docs Forum thread, the data should refresh about every hour

In that thread, a poster suggests appending a random querystring to the URL you wish to scrape from -

I used a simple workaround of appending a parameter which updates every minute.

Function call is: =ImportHtml("http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/standings/index.html?"&H81;"table";4)

Formula in H81 is: =Minute(Now())

This does the trick for me.