How to Set Up a Web Query in Excel 2003

Excel allows you to extract website data and perform calculations on it.

Microsoft Excel allows statisticians, mathematicians and students to extract data from any website on the Internet. By using the "Web Query" function you can make Excel pull up a URL and analyze it for specific data, depending on your preferences. This can be used in a myriad of applications -- to pull stock quotes from a financial website, product prices from a retail store and more.

Instructions

1. Launch Excel and open a new spreadsheet.

2. Select any cell and open the "Data" menu, open the "Get External Data" sub-menu and click the "New Web Query" option.

3. Type the URL address of the Web page you would like to analyze in the text box underneath "1".

4. Choose an option underneath "2". You can extract data from the entire page, from only tables or from a specific data table.

5. Select a formatting option: "none", "rich text formatting" or "full HTML formatting". If you just want to acquire data, then your best option is to select "none".

6. Click the "OK" button and click it again when the dialog box pops up. Excel will populate your spreadsheet with the website data and start from the cell you previously selected.