Get data from the web

Hello

There is no way to automate the process in Numbers.

I'm not acustomed to AppleScripting access to Web page and I am not interested to search how to do that.

If someone is able to copy the WEB page's content to the clipboard with a script, it would be possible to complete it so that the datas are organized a way compatible with Numbers so that a simple paste would put them in a table.

Of course I may write a script to re-organize what one may copy by hand in the clipboard but it's already available in a thread of this forum.

Use the search tool with the keyword "[/SCRIPT]" which is a string which I put at the end of quite all my scripts.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE lundi 14 janvier 2008 21:22:24)

Hello

It's what I was afraid of.

I assumes that it would be usefull to visit an Excel dedicated forum.
I know nothing about this product which like every µSoft products is not allowed to enter my home.
You typed Excel 4, I assumes that it means Excel 2004 because Excel version 4 is a dinosaurus dead before MacOS X 😉

It would be usefull to wait a few days because Office 2008 would be announced soon.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE lundi 14 janvier 2008 21:52:54)

Maino wrote:
I was just looking for an "automated" system to get data from different web pages ... The "Copy and Paste" way is not what I'm looking for : for example if I have to get 20 data from 20 different pages (different address) and put them in the same table ... it would be a nightmare ...

What do you suggest me to do ?

Maybe to use a different application ?

In general, this is a hard problem since the data delivered to you on a web page is in a human-readable format typically containing much more than the data that is desired (formatting, labels, ads, links, etc.), sometimes in a unpredictable form. A solution to this problem goes by the name "screen scrapping" as it is necessary to "scrape" data off a web page that wasn't designed to deliver data in an automated form. While applications other than Numbers may provide the automation hooks necessary to solve this problem, screen scraping would still remain the principle point of difficulty.

Hello

Try to google with the keyword _"scrapping software"_

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE jeudi 17 janvier 2008 23:02:56)

For the record it doesn't appear that this Web Query feature was included in Office 2008 so we're out of luck again. And this is a feature that's been in the Windows version for a long time!

In the docs online it mentions that this feature is included in Excel 2008, but it's not in there. Maybe they'll patch it later?

So far what I've seen from Office 2008 hasn't impressed me. But that's an entirely different post. 😉

Hello Maino,
I'm a xp user converting to mac. I also used a lot of queries for stock market data and excel 2003for XP had a nice way to do this. All I can find for Excel:mac 2004 which I am using are the three queries furnished with excel. The help menu tells you to modify them for other use.
The only one that can be modified to allow one to set new parameters is the MSN Moneycentral stock quotes. You can use one of the others to just get the information from a web page into your spreadsheet. I do the following:
Locate the cell in your worksheet where you want the query information to start.
Place the cursor in that cell
Go to the web page you want to query and copy the entire URL at the top of your browser for that page.
Now go to TextEdit and Open-Applications-Microsoft Office 2004-
Office-Queries and and open MSN Moneycentral Currencies.txt and delete the entire URL
http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/external/excel/rates.asp
and then past in its place the URL of your desired web page.

Now (Important!) Save this file with a new name that you will recognize to use again.
Be sure to include the .txt file extension at the end of your file name.
Now go to your spreadsheet and to the desired cell to locate the Query information.
Click Data-Get External data-Run Saved Query
Your new saved query will show up in grey, so you have to click the up arrow in the
Enable: box and choose All Documents-it will now show up ok. Now click on your new query file name and a box will ask where to put data, if location is OK click OK and query will run.

One problem with this is you can't control how the data will be placed on the worksheet. I have experimented with changing the Selection on my queries from Entirepage to table numbers. This is where Excel 2003 for XP really works great. It highlited the tables on the web page and you can pick which ones are to be downloaded. I don't know how to read HTPL so I'm unable to pick which tables I want from a code copy of the web page. Also, I don't find an auto refresh button anywhere in Excel:mac 2004. However, the View-toolbars-Get external data toolbar will allow you to refresh all the queries in a spreadsheet at once.
When I want multi pages to be queried, I use a separate sheet and rename it for each web page queried. I can then take data from each sheet with the sheetname! procedure to put the data on a final sheet.
I hope this will help you get a query.
If anyone knows how to get table values from web page HTML code, I hope you will post on this thread.