I was wondering if there is a command in excel or even a plugin that will allow it to monitor data on the internet, and transfer it to excel?

The data in question appears on every page of the site, but it changes constantly, which means a lot of copying and pasting, which wastes time. The whole point of it was to save time in the first place.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

maybe it might be a good idea to provide an example, it sounds kind of vague... what kind of data? what sort of pages?

if its a dynamic site, asp or php or something, then just store the data in a database and find a way to dynamically generate the excel sheet or a csv file (comma seperated value)

Yes, you can.

I've done it in two ways - one was to 'screen scrape' the site by writing a small VB DLL that accessed the site and pulled out the data, then made it available back in Excel by a macro call. This sometimes upsets the site owner who might not like being scraped.

Alternatively, see if the site as a web service or other API available, then make calls to that.

Joe

Thanks Joe, I'll try that :thumbsup:

Actually, I was looking at it in 'real time' - if you want to get historical data then the best approach might be to do what I do for the Forum statistics - I have a PHP script which scrapes the front page every 5 minutes and reads the post counts in to a CSV file, which I then download on a monthly basis and process in Excel.

If you can manage with a 'delay' it might be easier to use Perl or PHP on a web server to scrape the screen, because there are screen scraping libraries available. Then just dump the data in to a suitably formatted file.

Anyway, lots to go at! Good Luck!

Joe