What is a good user / "client-side" alternative to using the Internet Explorer right-click "export to Excel" feature?

August 18, 2007 11:29 AM

What is a good user / "client-side" alternative to using the Internet Explorer right-click "export to Excel" feature?

My work-at-home project requires me to right-click on a website's table, then choose "Export to Excel" in order to take that data, save it as a spreadsheet, and have my boss sign off on it. It sounds like "export to excel" is something that occurs via Internet Explorer, not the website per se, but I am not sure.

Is there any way to get around this situation considering:

a) I don't personally own Excel, but do have Open Office and Google Spreadsheets

b) the few times I tried it on a computer with Excel it didnt work anyway

I'd really like a non-excel way to do this. I'm not attached to IE, so if there's a quick Mozilla friendly way to export my work to my supervisor, that would be great too.

thanks in advance everyone!

posted by NikitaNikita to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Have you tried just copying and pasting? I've done that between Excel and Calc before.
posted by philomathoholic at 12:18 PM on August 18, 2007

What is the site you are trying to get info from?
posted by lampshade at 12:45 PM on August 18, 2007

Just select the table (be careful to select just the table, it gets a bit messier if you've got some of the stuff above or below it), hit copy, then move into Excel and hit paste.

To fine-tune, hit paste/special and experiment with the different options you'll find there.

Also you may get slightly different results by copying from different browsers. Again, experiment.
posted by flug at 12:47 PM on August 18, 2007

If the goal is a one-time pull from a site, just copy/paste. If this is a page which gets updated every week, look into the web-query functionality of open office (I haven't looked, but I assume it has it). In excel it works by having you navigate to the page, and selecting the table you want, then saving the URL and grabbing the data. The cool part is the "update" option which just goes and re-grabs the data. Again, I have no idea if open office can do it, but I'd bet it can.
posted by cschneid at 12:54 PM on August 18, 2007

In Firefox, use ctrl+click to select table squares, then Table2Clipboard (via right click) to copy it neatly to the clipboard. You can then ctrl+v/paste into OpenOffice.
posted by anaelith at 12:57 PM on August 18, 2007

Response by poster: lampshade: The website is specific to the company I am working for and one needs a log in to see it.
It is basic financial transaction information displayed in a grid with. Sort of like what you might see after logging into your bank or investment account website.

Thanks for the advice so far. I will try some of the suggestions given!
posted by NikitaNikita at 2:51 PM on August 18, 2007

Response by poster: (oops: also meant to answer that it is not a one-time pull but rather something frequently updated.)
posted by NikitaNikita at 2:52 PM on August 18, 2007

Like cschneid said, Excel has a web query built in (Data>Get External Data>Enter URL>Pick a table on the page>Save Query>Import), and you can just right-click in a cell and say "refresh data" when you need to.

I don't know about Open Office, but check to see if there is a similar path to getting data imported/refreshed.
posted by gemmy at 5:25 PM on August 18, 2007

TableTools for Firefox works for me. Has all sorts of sorting and filtering functions, but will also copy the contents of the table to the clipboard as tab-delimited text.
posted by scruss at 3:11 AM on August 19, 2007