Link web data to excel

Whether a digital native or immigrant, you probably know the basic functions of Excel inside out. With Excel, it is easy to accomplish simple tasks like sorting, filtering and outlining data and making charts based on them. When the data are highly structured, we can even perform advanced data analysis using pivot and regression models in Excel.

But the problem is, how can we extract scalable data and put them into Excel efficiently? This would be an extremely tedious task if done manually by repetitive typing, searching, copying, and pasting. So, how can we achieve automated data extraction and scraping from websites to Excel?

In this article, you can learn 3 ways to scrape data from websites to Excel to save your time and energy.

Automated Scraping Websites to Excel

If you are looking for a quick tool to scrape data off pages to Excel but don't know about coding, then you can try Octoparse, an auto-scraping tool, which can scrape website data and export them into Excel worksheets either directly or via API. Download Octoparse to your Windows or Mac device, and get started extracting website data immediately with the easy steps below. Or you can read the step-by-step tutorial of web scraping.

Extract Data from Website to Excel Automatically with Octoparse

• Step 1: Copy and paste the website link to Octoparse product panel, and start auto-detect.
• Step 2: Customize the data field you want to scrape, you can also set the workflow manually.
• Step 3: Run the task after you checked, you can download the data as Excel or other formats after a few minutes.

Video Tutorial: Extract Web Data to Excel Efficiently

Web Scraping Project Customer Service

If time is your most valuable asset and you want to focus on your core businesses, outsourcing such complicated work to a proficient web scraping team that has experience and expertise might be the best option. Data scraping is difficult to scrape data from websites due to the fact that the presence of anti-scraping bots will restrain the practice of web scraping. A proficient web scraping team would help you get data from websites in a proper way and deliver structured data to you in an Excel sheet, or in any format you need.

Here are some customer stories that how Octoparse web scraping service helps businesses of all sizes.

Get Web Data Using Excel Web Queries

Except for transforming data from a web page manually by copying and pasting, Excel Web Queries are used to quickly retrieve data from a standard web page into an Excel worksheet. It can automatically detect tables embedded in the web page's HTML. Excel Web queries can also be used in situations where a standard ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) connection gets hard to create or maintain. You can directly scrape a table from any website using Excel Web Queries.

Here list the simple steps on how to extract website data with Excel web queries. Or you can check out from this link: http://www.excel-university.com/pull-external-data-into-excel/.

1. Go to Data > Get External Data > From Web.

2. A browser window named “New Web Query” will appear.

3. In the address bar, write the web address.

 (picture from excel-university.com)

4. The page will load and will show yellow icons against data/tables.

5. Select the appropriate one.

6. Press the Import button.

Now you have the web data scraped into the Excel Worksheet - perfectly arranged in rows and columns as you like.

Scrape Web Data with Excel VBA

Most of us would use formula's in Excel (e.g. =avg(...), =sum(...), =if(...), etc.) a lot, but are less familiar with the built-in language - Visual Basic for Application a.k.a VBA. It’s commonly known as “Macros” and such Excel files are saved as a **.xlsm. Before using it, you need to first enable the Developer tab in the ribbon (right-click File -> Customize Ribbon -> check Developer tab). Then set up your layout. In this developer interface, you can write VBA code attached to various events. Click HERE (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ee814737(v=office.14).aspx) to getting started with VBA in Excel 2010.

Using Excel VBA is going to be a bit technical - this is not very friendly for non-programmers among us. VBA works by running macros, step-by-step procedures written in Excel Visual Basic. To scrape data from websites to Excel using VBA, we need to build or get some VBA script to send some requests to web pages and get returned data from these web pages. It’s common to use VBA with XML HTTP and regular expressions to parse the web pages. For Windows, you can use VBA with Win HTTP or Internet Explorer to scrape data from websites to Excel.

With some patience and some practice, you would find it worthwhile to learn some Excel VBA code and some HTML knowledge to make your web scraping into Excel much easier and more efficient for automating the repetitive work. There’s a plentiful amount of material and forums for you to learn how to write VBA code.

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