Thread: Data gathering from webpages

Hello,

My question is somewhat odd and I do not know if excel has any way of doing what I need it to, but I thought I would ask anyway. Basically here is the situation. I am a college student doing a research paper, and the data I need is in regards to baseball attendance. I can find on the teams website the box scores that list the attendance. Is there anything I can set up that will automatically gather the attendance, rather than me individually going game by game for each team? I dont know if thats something a macro could do or anything else in excel? If there was a way, It would save hours upon hours of clicking back and forth and typing the data into excel.

If you know of any way that might help, please do tell.

Thanks a ton!

Hi, thanks for changing the title.

try this in Excel 2003:

on a blank sheet, click Data - Import External Data - New Web query.

You will see a little mini browser window. Enter the URL in the address field and click Go

When you've reached the page you want, note the little yellow/black arrows that point to data tables on the page.

Click the arrow that most closely relates to the table and then click Import

Now this data is in Excel. You can copy and paste to somewhere else, and after saving the file, you can come back and refresh the web query by right-clicking anywhere in the data table and selecting Refresh from the context menu.

Does that get you any further?

This bit?

Att: 1,544.

This is probably something for the VBA wizards. I guess the scope is:

On a spreadsheet, have a list of web sites in a column
macro takes one cell after the other,
- opens web page
- finds string "Att:" on web page
- copies the number next to "Att:" into the cell next to the web page

Something like that?

Edit: Or, you could just email the clubs and ask them to send you their attendances statistics, which they will have filed away somewhere!

Yes that sounds about what I am looking for.. I will try to contact the teams or league tomorrow and see who has the info and if they can send me it.

I will check around to see if there is anything else I can figure out to do it as well