How much do you use Google Sheets?
If you are one who ends up creating a lot of reports or somebody who is playing with data, scratching it and finding out insights from it - you must have used Google sheets.
There are some mind blowing functionalities in Google sheets that can make your work easy and understandable. Do you know you can copy paste a table from a webpage into google sheet or even fetch a title from a webpage using google sheets?
Doesn’t it sound wow? A simple tool like Google sheet can be an effective web scraper tool.
Before going to other aspects, let’s start with a bit of technicalities. The formulas that you can use for basic web scraping -
There are many more but these two are the basic ones. If you got lost? Don’t worry. It will be clear with examples.
Suppose you want to fetch below table from wikipedia to your google sheet
Formula used -
=IMPORTHTML("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films","table",1)
Some might feel that fetching an article title is not a tough task. Why use a formula? It's true that it's not a big task. But think of a situation when you want to fetch a title for 100 articles.
This formula can make your work in minutes.
Let me take 2 different articles -
Find out the H1 HTML tag
Formula - =IMPORTXML(A2,"//*[@class='main-head single-view-head’]")
Isn’t it amazing that you can even fetch amazon product title, rating and reviews.
For example, let me use the following product - https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Ergonomic-Keyboard-Business-5KV-00001/dp/B00CYX26BC/
Formula - =IMPORTXML(A2,"//*[@id='productTitle']")
If you want to find a price or rating, the formula will be changed a bit.
To be honest, Web scraping via Google sheets is quite impressive. It can make big monotonous tasks easy.
So, next time don’t engage in a boring job. Apply a formula and scrape your data easily.
Hope you enjoyed reading it!!