Practicing the Black Art (04/01)
Link Websites to your spreadsheet
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@home.com
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
How many times have you searched for information on the Web, got your results and wished you could put it into your spreadsheet for additional analysis? To quickly link to a Web page from Excel, first open both Excel and your browser. With either Netscape or Internet Explorer, there is an easy way to open a Web page in Excel from within Excel.
This really helps save time if you want to take online data and subject it to further examination. It doesn't work for all web pages but it does work well if the data you want is in table format.
- Highlight the URL of the Web page in the Location or Address box of your browser. This technique works the same with Netscape or Internet Explorer. (Figure 1)
- Launch Excel if it's not already open.
- From the Excel File menu, select Open.
- Then copy the URL in the File name: box.
- Specify Web Pages (*.htm, *.html) in the Files of Type: box. (Figure 2)
Excel will load the Web page into your spreadsheet. This works with Excel 95, 97 and 2000. It should work with any spreadsheet, but I tested only Excel.
The table information sometimes comes over in a single column. If that's the case, go to the Data menu and use the Text to Columns feature to put the data in the appropriate column format. :
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Copyright 2001. This article is from the April 2001 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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