If you’ve ever come across a web site that maintains skads of tabular data that you would love to download and manipulate, there’s an easy way to get it in Microsoft Excel. Here’s how. First, the website’s data has to be contained in a table. While most web designers now try to design sites without using tables, there are still a lot of sites out there that use tables, especially for data. Let’s say, for instance, you wanted your own list of all the filing fee costs in Ramsey County District Court, which is available at http://www.mncourts.gov/district/2/?page=1133.

Open Excel. Then choose “Data” from the menu. Then choose “Import External Data” and choose “New Web Query.” Sounds complicated, but it’s not, as you can see from this image:

Once you open up a new Web Query, you simply type in the address of the web page from which you want data. In our case, it will be http://www.mncourts.gov/district/2/?page=1133.  Type in that web address, hit enter, and you will navigate immediately to that web page. Your screen should look somewhat like this:

Choose the arrow next to the table that Excel has automatically selected and then choose import. Voila, you should then have an Excel spreadsheet with all the filing fees listed. You can then sort, delete or label them as you choose (and typically there will need to be some clean up with the table). It’s a useful tip to know, especially if you need to move data from an external website into your own spreadsheet in order to make more use of that data, including more complex analysis.

Now, I haven’t tried to do this yet in OpenOffice, so stay tuned for more info (or let us know if you can). Also, Excel 2007 is a bit different in how you maneuver through its ‘ribbon’ menu, but it otherwise does the same thing.