Below is the code for a quick, easy custom Excel function to remove HTML tags and code from a string. This function can be used directly in a sheet, or be called from within VBA. Examples The function will strip complete html tags or if the string has a partial tag (starts with a tag…
Read MoreThis post is going to get a bit technical- If you’re just looking for a quick tool to scrape data off pages and you’re not trying to set up the code yourself, I’d recommend this post: Search source code of any sites with Excel. You can just download the completed VBA file, and get some…
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What is site searching and why do I need it? If you ever find yourself looking at a list of URLs and are contemplating doing anything that involves copying and pasting each one into a browser and looking at the corresponding website, you are probably looking at something that could be automated. To that end,…
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The problem: Needing to download hundreds of images instantly At Balihoo we are changing providers for our blogging platform, and one of the challenges that came up was how to extract all the images (Over 600) we had uploaded to our existing software without having a built-in tool for pulling them off the server. While…
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This post is includes the second half of the scripting required for the web-scraping project described in last weeks post. With a completed list of the blog post and their corresponding URLS, the next step is to code a scraper that will visit each page, search out the blog content and any relevant tags then…
Read MoreAt Balihoo, we recently encountered a problem. We needed to extract all the text and formatting from past blog posts we had written, but our service provider didn’t have a tool to do that. Since there were over 600 posts, this isn’t the kind of project you want to do by hand. With a bit…
Read MoreVBA or Visual Basic for Applications is a fantastic tool for automating a number of tasks across the Microsoft suite. Some of the greatest uses come from integrating Excel with Internet Explorer allowing a user to be able to scrape data off various websites and dump the data into Excel. This post will show how…
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