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How to export a table from a website to Excel

There are three ways to do it. They all work on a simple public page. They don't all work on a company portal, a table inside a frame, or a list that goes on for 40 pages. Here's what each one handles.

1. Copy and paste

Select the table with the mouse, press Ctrl+C, click a cell in Excel and press Ctrl+V. If the result keeps the website's colors and fonts, use Home › Paste › Match Destination Formatting instead.

It's the fastest way, and on a clean, small table it's enough. The problems start when you try to use the data:

• Numbers arrive as text. “$1,250.00” or “1.250,00 €” often land in Excel as text: they sit on the left, and SUM returns 0. See numbers pasted from a website become text.
• Codes lose their zeros. A ZIP code like 02134 becomes 2134, and a long ID becomes 3.33E+10. See why Excel removes leading zeros.
• Dates are read the wrong way round when the site and your Excel use a different order (10/12 is October 12 in the US and 10 December almost everywhere else).
• Junk comes along: empty rows, the header repeated every 20 rows, buttons and icons from the page.
• Only one page at a time. If the table is split across pages with a “Next” button, you repeat everything for each page.

2. Excel's “From Web”

Excel can read a web page by itself. In Excel for Windows: Data › Get Data › From Other Sources › From Web (in some versions it's directly Data › From Web). Paste the page address, and Excel shows a list of the tables it found. Pick one and click Load, or Transform Data to fix column types before loading.

It's a good option for public pages you need to refresh often, because the query can be updated with one click. But Excel opens the page on its own, outside your browser, and that has limits:

• Pages behind a login don't work. Excel doesn't have your session, so a company portal, an online banking page or an admin panel usually shows a login page or nothing at all.
• Tables built by the page after loading can be missing, depending on how the site builds them.
• Internal addresses (intranet, old ERP screens) are often not reachable the same way.

3. A browser extension

An extension works inside your browser, on the page you're already looking at. That's the difference: if you can see the table, it can read it, even behind a login, inside a frame, or on an internal portal.

With Export Button it goes like this:

1. Open the page with the table.
2. Click the extension icon. It lists the tables on the page; hover one and it lights up, so you know which is which.
3. Click Excel (or CSV). The file is built in your browser and downloaded.

Before writing the file it cleans the data: amounts become real numbers (whatever the format: $1,234.56, 1.234,56 €, R$ 1.234,56), dates become dates, codes with leading zeros stay as written, empty rows and repeated headers are dropped. Tables split in two on the page (a frozen first column, or headers kept in a separate table) are put back together.

Which one to use