Excel auto-fill form on web page
February 18, 2013 9:33 AM   Subscribe

I have an excel file with a list of phone numbers and someone requested that links be added, so that when you click on one, our text paging web page is opened and the "To" field is auto-populated with the pager number. Is this possible? I have no control over this text paging web page, but the input field for the form does have a name. This is the page: http://www.myairmail.com/ Thanks!
posted by jjbb to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
This is doable with Excel VBA. If you don't have experience with Visual Basic, this is not an easy task to just figure out on your own. If you or a coworker are familiar with Visual Basic, you could alter this script to do what you want.

The linked script takes as an input a username and password and logs into a specified website. You'd have to modify it instead to input the number when clicked.
posted by muddgirl at 9:41 AM on February 18, 2013




Best answer: You don't need to use VBA. You just need to format the link correctly. In this case, it would be in the form of http://www.myairmail.com/?gw_pin=123-456-7890 (replacing the part after "=" with the actual number).

Rather than hotlinking the phone numbers--which could get annoying if you're trying to copy it out for some other purpose--you might want to add another column that concatenates the number after the static part of the link. I think Excel turns URLs into hotlinks automatically.

You can inspect the form on that web page to get the input-field names, and pre-fill several in one go by stringing together field names and input values like this: "field1=this&field2=that".

if you want to get fancy, you could create buttons in your spreadsheet that would pretty this up, let you click to send canned messages, etc. But at a basic level, no scripting required.
posted by adamrice at 1:22 PM on February 18, 2013 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: Also, excel did not make the hyperlinks automatically, but between the HYPERLINK and CONCATENATE functions, automating that part was pretty simple.

Thank you!
posted by jjbb at 12:27 PM on February 21, 2013


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