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270 Part VI: Excel and the Web
Try It
Exercise 20-6: Exporting the Spreadsheet Data in a Web Page Back to Excel
Open the workbook Exercise20-2.htm Web page you created earlier in Exercise 20-2
and saved in your Chapter 20 folder in the My Practice Spreadsheets folder with
Internet Explorer. You will use the Home Sales data table in this Web page to practice
saving changes made in an interactive Web page back to Excel:
1. Make the same formatting and editing changes to the Home Sales data table that
you did in Exercise 20-2 by referring to steps 5 through 12 in this exercise.
2. Close the Command and Options dialog box and then click the Export to
Microsoft Excel button to open the formatted and edited Home Sales table in
Excel as an XML file with an OWCSheet filename.
3. Choose Tools➪Options to open the Options dialog box and then select the
Gridlines check box on the View menu and the Automatic option button on
the Calculation tab before you select OK.
Now you’re ready to save the changes you made to the Home Sales table in
Internet Explorer as well as the changes you just made in Excel.
4. Choose File➪Save As to open the Save As dialog box and then click the My
Documents button in the left pane.
5. Double-click the My Practice Spreadsheets folder icon in the My Document
list box and then double-click the Chapter 20 folder icon in the My Practice
Spreadsheets list box.
6. Click the File Name text box and then type Solved20-6.xml as the new work-
book’s filename before you select the Save button.
7. Close your new Solved20-6.xml file containing the formatted and edited Home
Sales table, but don’t exit Excel.
Doing a Web Query
You can use Excel’s Web Query feature to extract text or tables (or a combination of
the two) from Web pages on the World Wide Web and bring their data into an Excel
worksheet. Doing a Web query is a lot like performing the external database query you
did in Chapter 16 (with many fewer steps) that extract data from Web pages on the
Internet instead of from an external database.
The key to being able to do a Web query is having the URL address of the Web site
whose data you want to query (you know, the http://-type address that appears
on the Address bar of your Web browser when you visit a site). You must have this
address handy at the time you start the new Web query because the New Web Query
dialog box does not provide a way to search the Internet nor does it give you access to
your Web favorites as you have in your Web browser.
Often the best way to do capture the URL address for the page you want to query is to
visit the Web site in your Web browser (using your Web favorites or it search capabil-
ity), and then select the URL address that appears on the Web browser’s Address bar
and copy it into the Clipboard with the Edit➪Copy menu command or Ctrl+C. Then,
switch over to Excel, select the text currently displayed in the Address bar of the New
Web Query dialog box (refer to the steps that follow), and paste the page’s URL
address in this text box by pressing Ctrl+V. (You must use this shortcut as you don’t
have access to the Edit➪Paste command on the Excel pull-down menus from within a
dialog box.)