Topic: Cutting & Pasting Internet Data Into Spreadsheets

[GillE]

Don't know if this is the right place to ask about this  ...

From time to time I find myself browsing the internet and wishing I could download data from certain websites and paste it into a spreadsheet.  I'm currently using Excel 97 but I've no objection to using Open Office Calc.

The data I want is always in the same tabular format which is columns of names and numbers, including fractions which I want to preserve in their crude form.  However, the amount of data and its contents vary.

Whenever I cut and paste into the spreadsheet, the fractions are converted into dates!  Even if I format the cells first to 'Fraction' or 'All', they still end up as dates.  How can I overcome this?

[Rik]

How about pasting to Word first, Gill, and from there to Excel?

[sam]

ok - this is when some linux command line tools would be rather helpful - you could extract the data using wget and grep... oh well.

On a microsoft machine I'd recommend something similar to Rik but not word. Copy the data off the webpage and paste it into notepad. If it is tabulated then I'd save the file as a whatever.csv (ok this isn't really a comma separated variable file but it will convince excel or open office to treat it like this). You then need to import the file - if you open the file in open office this should then give you some options to open it - you can choose how it reads in the data - make sure that you change the type for the fraction to scientific or something like that.

Hope this helps - if it doesn't give me the webpage you'd like and I'll do a screengrab process... (but it will be with linux and open office... but the same thing will apply).

[GillE]

No joy, I'm afraid .

Linux is beginning to appeal to me, but I feel as if I'm being lured like one of Count Dracula's victims in the old Hammer horror films .  Sadly, coding is a completely foreign activity to me.  Would it be difficult to learn that sort of programming, Sam, if I was to boot up Linux from a live cd?

I could always use the Vista snipping tool for screen capture, but that would only save it as an image whereas I want the tabulated data.

[sam]

if you want to give me a link I can see if I can come up with a simple guide to doing it.... I expect its probably the way you are importing the file into excel.

Some programming languages are rather easy to pick up - I'd personally recommend R (incidentally this, like many programming languages, are cross platform and thus run on windows too). Most of the live cd's don't come with these tools operational from the start though - they are normally on the disk but you can't run them until you have installed the OS. I think anyone can learn to programme it just takes persistence and maybe a slight change of thinking.