Also, this method works only if the data is publicly available, which means there shouldn’t be requirements for authorisation etc. Prior to extracting or importing data that hasn’t been curated by you make sure you have the necessary permissions.

The following instructions will walk you through the process: Create a new Google Spreadsheet (or open an existing. In this article, I’ll describe the end to the end process of fetching tables( and lists) into google sheets. To use the Google Analytics add-on you must first add it to your spreadsheet. It was then that I came across a convenient function in Google Sheets called IMPORTHTML, which is ideal for importing data from a table or list within an HTML page. Scraping was another option, but I was looking for something quick and easy and which didn’t involve a ton of code. So every time, there was a change in the original dataset, I had to fetch the dataset again.įor situations like these, simply copy-pasting wasn’t enough. When the data wasn’t static, i.e., it updated after regular intervals.When the table was typically long and spread across a complete webpage.For most parts, it worked well, but there were few instances when the typical copy-paste methodology failed miserably: As always, I copied the data and pasted it on the excel sheet. Last week I came across some pretty good tabular data sets on Wikipedia. It takes some amount of cleaning and filtering to bring the data into a format that is ideal for analysis. However, getting that data in the right format is the real deal. “Getting information off the internet is like taking a drink from a firehose.” - Mitchell Kapor

Original Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Import google sheets to excel