Scrape Data from Any Website in Excel

Table of Contents

· Intro
· Pasting in the URL
· Choosing the Right Table
· Conclusion

Intro

If you come across an article that contains data that you’re interested in, then there’s an easy way to import that data into Excel. Here’s how to do it…

Pasting in the URL

First, you have to go to the “Data” ribbon and click on “From Web”, which will show you something that looks like this:

All you have to do is paste in the URL of the website. In my case, I’ll paste in a Wikipedia article that contains video game sales:

Choosing the Right Table

After you click on “OK”, you have to choose the table that contains the data that you’re interested in. This is because Excel sometimes detects other tables from the website, so you have to make sure to select the right sheet by looking at its preview:

Since the preview for my data contains all the video game sales, I’m gonna click on “Transform Data” (do NOT click on “Load”!):

This will take you to the Power Query Editor, which is the tool where you clean up the data:

Conclusion

That’s pretty much all it takes to import data from a website into Excel. If you want to learn how to clean data inside the Power Query Editor, then check out this 6-minute video:

Thank you for reading!

Originally published at https://dylans0ng.github.io on February 3, 2024.