Damien mentioned at his Online PR workshop on Saturday that there was a way to capture Google Alerts in a spreadsheet rather than into your inbox. Handy, no? So I had a look into it. Below is the how-to.
Sorry about the image quality, not sure what WordPress is doing to my images 
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1. Set up your Google Alert and be sure to select Feed from the Deliver to: dropdown list
2. Get your feed URL
3. Create a new Google Spreadsheet in Google Docs, select a cell and select the Forumlas button. Choose Google from the category listing presented and then double-click on ImportFeed.
4. When you get the space to pop your info into, blank out what’s in between the brackets and add in your feed URL. Make sure it’s wrapped in double quotes or else it won’t work. Hit enter and away you go.
Step 4
Lovely, didn’t know about those functions in Google Docs – thanks
Thanks for going to the trouble to post that. Also saw it on Damien’s course, but hadn’t gotten around to following up on it yet. This has saved me the trouble