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Advice on how to scrape tables of data or HTML from webpages using VBA Part one of a three-part series of blogs
You can use VBA to extract data from web pages, either as whole tables or by parsing the underlying HTML elements. This blog shows you how to code both methods (the technique is often called "web-scraping"). Two ways to get data from websites using Excel VBA (this blog) Extracting a table of data from a website using a VBA query Scraping a website HTML in VBA

Advice on how to scrape tables of data or HTML from webpages using VBA

Part one of a three-part series of blogs

You can use VBA to extract data from web pages, either as whole tables or by parsing the underlying HTML elements. This blog shows you how to code both methods (the technique is often called "web-scraping").

Two ways to get data from websites using Excel VBA (this blog)
Extracting a table of data from a website using a VBA query
Scraping a website HTML in VBA

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 January 2014

In this blog

Downloading websites' data
Parsing a website's HTML

Two ways to get data from websites using Excel VBA

There are two ways to get information from websites programmatically: by downloading their data, or by parsing their HTML.

If yoiur VBA skills aren't up to scratch, we've got lots of VBA training material on this website to help you!

Downloading websites' data

If you want to get at tables of data published to a website (such as currency exchange rates, fantasy football tables or weather forecast data), the easiest way to do it is by adding a linked table into Excel:

An example - importing a list of all forthcoming advanced Excel courses from the Wise Owl site.

While the data for this example is years out of date, all the principles (and the VBA) are still valid.

Parsing a website's HTML

This is a bit harder, since you need to understand a bit about HTML, and be prepared to work hard to parse data in VBA. The example we'll cover will download a list of all of the questions from the StackOverflow home page:

What the downloaded data will look like after running our macro.

The rest of this blog shows how to do each of these tasks, beginning with the simpler one: querying a table of data on a website.

Parts of this blog
Two ways to get data from websites using Excel VBA (this blog) Extracting a table of data from a website using a VBA query Scraping a website HTML in VBA

Some other pages relevant to the above blogs include:

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