Macro to grab webpages

Hi,

I am writing an Excel macro that goes to a series of URLs (on a company intranet application) and extracts data into Excel which I will then merge and reformat for subsequent upload into MS Access.

The spanner in the works is knowing when the webpage has loaded.

If the macro sends subsequent commands (usually SendKeys) to IE before the page has loaded the whole things falls over.

The most reliable way I've found is simply to use

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But since some of the web pages in question can take up to a minute to load (hell that's why I'm trying to automate download afterall....) that means putting whole minute waits all the way through the macro

Other code I've tried is creating loops using Events in IE:

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or

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But those seem to work a bit sporadically.

Has anyone else tackled this problem, or can think of better approaches I could try?

I've had some success in using Excel to write scripts in a language called Ruby which is designed to work with web pages and then shelling the Ruby executable.

The attachment used to work in driving EBay (before they changed the design of their site)