Friday, December 28, 2007

Getting data from Web Pages into Excel

Web Queries are simple but extremely powerful feature of Microsoft Excel that help you import live data from external websites into your Excel sheets - all you have to do is visually select portions of a web page in the browser and Excel will do the rest.

With Excel web queries, you can import information like Google search results, the latest CNN headlines, stock quotes, currency exchange rates or even monitor regular websites for changes.

Click the "From Web" menu under Data -> Get External Data group. A new Web Query Dialog popus up - type the web URL here (see example for Google News below).

Click the Yellow Arrows next to the tables that would like to bring into Excel and Import.

You can do a similar thing using IE - just navigate to the web page that has the data and select "Export to Excel" from the Internet Explorer contextual menu.

Once the data is inside Excel, you can do all sort of complex things like conditional formatting, sorting, create charts, etc. You can either keep that data static or set it to auto-refresh so Excel will automatically update the worksheet whenever the source web page changes.

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