Does your language of choice have a Google Chart integration? Rails has a couple options, and I have never found anything that gets "quick and dirty chart" done as fast or easily. I currently use it for most of my dashboard charts. While it has some annoying limitations it frees you from server-side dependencies on image modification libraries and the resulting charts (static images) can be accessed from a cell phone. (Some of the Javascript and Flash solutions I've used don't handle that so well.)
This lets you ignore the whole annoying step of logging into Google Docs to review the data -- just spit the URL for the chart directly into an image tag on your panel, problem solved. It also greatly simplifies any sort of "manipulate Google Docs' interface" step you might have, since you can just write arbitrary parsing code in your language of choice and then spit the numbers into the chart.
For additional sexy you can add any lightbox script you want and then have, essentially, a Javascript zoom button for any of them in about 4 marginal lines of code.
This lets you ignore the whole annoying step of logging into Google Docs to review the data -- just spit the URL for the chart directly into an image tag on your panel, problem solved. It also greatly simplifies any sort of "manipulate Google Docs' interface" step you might have, since you can just write arbitrary parsing code in your language of choice and then spit the numbers into the chart.
For additional sexy you can add any lightbox script you want and then have, essentially, a Javascript zoom button for any of them in about 4 marginal lines of code.