How to Extract Data from Website to Excel Automatically

Manually copying and pasting data from a website into an Excel spreadsheet is a repetitive task that eats away at your time. Whether you're tracking competitor prices, monitoring stock market data, or gathering research, this manual process is prone to errors and quickly becomes outdated. This tutorial will show you how to set up an automated process to extract data from a website directly into Excel, ensuring your data is always current.

Why Should You Automate Data Extraction?

Taking a few minutes to automate your data gathering process can save you hours of work each week and provide much more reliable insights. There are a few key benefits:

• Time Savings: The most obvious benefit. Once set up, the connection automatically pulls data for you on a schedule. No more daily copy-paste routines. Your Monday morning report can be ready for you before you even grab your coffee.
• Data Accuracy: Manual data entry inevitably leads to typos, formatting issues, or missed information. An automated connection eliminates human error, ensuring the data in your spreadsheet is an exact copy of the source.
• Fresh and Timely Data: Markets change, inventory shifts, and analytics update by the minute. Manually updated spreadsheets are static snapshots in time. An automated connection can refresh as often as you need, giving you real-time information to make timely and informed decisions.

Automating this flow frees you from tedious data "janitor" work and allows you to spend more time analyzing the information and finding valuable insights.

Method 1: Using Excel's Built-In "From Web" Feature (Power Query)

The most direct way to get website data into Excel is by using a powerful built-in tool called Power Query. You might not have heard of it by name, but it’s the engine behind the "Get & Transform Data" section in the Data tab. It’s perfect for pulling information from static HTML tables on websites, like sports statistics tables on Wikipedia or financial data from public websites.

Let's walk through an example. Imagine we want to track the current list of S&P 500 companies from Wikipedia.

Step-by-Step Guide to Using Power Query:

1. Find Your Data URL

First, navigate to the webpage containing the data you want to extract. For our example, we'll use the Wikipedia page for the "List of S&P 500 companies." All you need is the URL of this page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies

2. Open the "From Web" Connector in Excel

In Excel, go to the Data tab on the ribbon. In the "Get & Transform Data" section, click on From Web. If you are using an older version of Excel, you might find this under Get External Data.

3. Enter the URL

A dialog box will appear asking for the URL. Paste the URL of the Wikipedia page into the box and click OK.

4. Select the Data Table

Excel will analyze the webpage and open a "Navigator" window. This window shows you all the structured data tables it has identified on the page. You'll see a list of items like "Table 0," "Table 1," and so on.

You can click on each table in the left-hand navigation pane to see a preview on the right. In our example, the list of S&P 500 components is in the first table. Select the table you want (it will be highlighted) and then click the Load button at the bottom.

5. Edit and Refine (Optional)

Instead of "Load," you can also click Transform Data. This will open the Power Query Editor, a powerful tool for cleaning and reshaping your data before it even lands in your spreadsheet. You can remove columns, filter rows, change data types, and much more. For now, we'll stick with simply loading the data.

Excel will now import the data into a new worksheet as a formatted table. Simple as that! You now have a live connection to that website.

How to Set Up Automatic Refresh

The real magic happens when you tell Excel to automatically update this data.

• In the Table Design tab that appears when you click on the table, find the Refresh dropdown and click Refresh All. This performs a manual update.
• To automate it, go to the Data tab and click Queries & Connections.
• A pane will open on the right. Right-click on your query (it will be named after the table you selected) and choose Properties.
• In the Properties dialog box, you have several options under the "Refresh control" section. You can choose to "Refresh every _ minutes" or "Refresh data when opening the file."

By scheduling refreshes, your Excel workbook will always contain the latest data from the source website without any manual effort.

Method 2: Using Google Sheets as a Bridge to Excel

Sometimes, Excel’s Power Query struggles with certain websites or you might find the process easier within the Google ecosystem first. A fantastic alternative is using Google Sheets’ powerful IMPORTHTML function and then linking that sheet to Excel.

The IMPORTHTML function is incredibly simple to use and great for pulling tables or lists.

Step-by-Step Guide with Google Sheets:

1. Use the IMPORTHTML Formula in Google Sheets

Open a new Google Sheet. In cell A1, type the following formula:

=IMPORTHTML("URL", "query", "index")

• Replace "URL" with the address of the website.
• Replace "query" with either "table" or "list" depending on what kind of data structure you are trying to import.
• The "index" is a number that specifies which table or list on the page you want to pull (the first one is 1, the second is 2, and so on).

Using our S&P 500 example again, the formula would be:

=IMPORTHTML("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies", "table", 1)

Press Enter, and Google Sheets will instantly populate the sheet with the data. This data automatically refreshes periodically (roughly every hour).

2. Publish the Google Sheet to the Web

Now, we need to create a link that Excel can read.

• In your Google Sheet, go to File → Share → Publish to web.
• In the "Link" tab, select the specific sheet you want to publish. Then, in the second dropdown, choose Comma-separated values (.csv).
• Click the Publish button and copy the generated URL.

3. Connect Excel to the Published Google Sheet Link

The steps here are exactly the same as in Method 1.

1. Go to your Excel workbook, go to the Data tab, and click From Web.
2. Paste the .csv URL you just copied from Google Sheets.
3. Click OK and a preview will appear. Click Load.

Now, your Excel file is linked to your Google Sheet, which is linked to the live website. It's a slightly indirect route, but it’s very effective and reliable.

Method 3: Using Dedicated Web Scraping Tools

What if the data isn't in a nice, clean HTML table? Many modern websites are dynamic, loading content with JavaScript. For these more complex situations, Power Query and IMPORTHTML often fail. This is where dedicated web scraping tools come in.

These tools are designed to automate browser actions, just like a human would. They can click buttons, scroll down pages, and extract data from almost any part of a website's layout. Most modern scrapers offer a no-code visual interface, making them accessible to non-technical users.

Popular User-Friendly Scraping Tools:

• Octoparse: A powerful visual tool that lets you build scrapers by just clicking on the elements you want to extract. It can handle complex sites and offers templates for popular targets like Amazon or Yelp.
• ParseHub: A free and flexible tool that can scrape data from interactive websites with dropdowns, logins, and infinite scroll.

How They Generally Work:

1. Point and Click: You open the target website within the tool's built-in browser and click on the data fields you want to grab (e.g., product name, price, rating).
2. Build a Recipe: The tool records your actions and builds a data extraction "recipe" or "agent." You can teach it to navigate through multiple pages (pagination) to collect all the listings.
3. Run and Export: You run the project, and the tool will automatically execute the steps, gathering the data. When it's done, you can download the data as an Excel or CSV file. Many of these tools also offer scheduled cloud execution.

Note: When scraping, always be respectful of the website. Check their robots.txt file (e.g., www.example.com/robots.txt) and Terms of Service to understand their data usage policies.

Final Thoughts

Automating data extraction from websites into Excel removes one of the most tedious manual tasks from a modern workflow. Whether you choose Excel’s native Power Query for simple tables, the flexible IMPORTHTML function in Google Sheets, or a dedicated scraping tool for complex sites, you can build a system that delivers accurate, timely data on autopilot, freeing you up for more strategic work.

For marketing and sales teams, this type of automation is a great first step. But often, the challenge isn't just one website, it's pulling data from Google Analytics, then Facebook Ads, then Shopify, HubSpot, and Salesforce, and trying to stitch it all together in Excel. At Graphed, we automate all of it. Instead of manually setting up web connections one by one, you just connect your platforms once. Then, you can use natural language — like asking a colleague — to instantly create reports and dashboards. No formulas, no scraping, just real-time, cross-channel insights.