A simple guide to 2023

Web scraping can be a powerful tool for extracting data from websites, but it can also be a complex and time-consuming process. Fortunately, Google Sheets offers a user-friendly solution for scraping data from websites without the need to write complex code. Using the power of Google Sheets, you can easily extract data from web pages and analyze it in a variety of ways. In this blog, I’ll walk you through the process of using Google Sheets to scrape web pages and help you unlock the potential of web scraping for your own projects. So let’s get started.

Web Scraping can be time consuming, complex and involves a lot of coding. Not for coders. Google Sheets is a great alternative to web scraping. Google Sheet web scraping does not involve coding and provides multiple ways to analyze website data.

In this blog, we will see how to use Google Sheets to easily scrape web pages. So let’s get started.

Why use Google Sheets for web scraping?

There are several reasons why Google Sheets is a great tool for web scraping.

• Google Sheets is easy to use and has a familiar interface.
• It does not require knowledge of programming language.
• Google Sheets is accessible from anywhere.
• Google Sheets is free, making it affordable for individuals and small businesses.
• Google easily integrates with other tools in the Suite.
• You can use macros or scripts to automate web scraping tasks.
• You can easily analyze scraped data using Google Sheet formulas.

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Extract text from any web page with just one click. Go to the Nanonets site scraper, add the URL and click “Scrape” and instantly download the site text as a file. Try it now for free!

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What Features to Use for Google Sheets Web Scraping?

Here are some features you can use when you need to scrape web pages using Google Sheets.

IMPORTHTML:

Extract tables and lists from HTML pages.

=IMPORTHTML(url, query, index)

• url. This is the link to the webpage you want to scrape
• request. Data type – Table, List
• index If you want to extract a specific table, you can use this

For example:

=IMPORTHTML("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)","table",1)

IMPORTXML:

Extracting data from XML pages.

=IMPORTXML(url, xpath_query)

• url: This is the link to the web page you want to scrape
• xpath_query: An XPath expression that identifies the data you want to extract

For example:

=IMPORTXML("https://www.w3schools.com/xml/note.xml", "//note/to")

IMPORT DATA.

Extract data from CSV and TSV files.

=IMPORTDATA(url)

• url: The URL of the CSV or TSV file you want to extract data from

For example:

=IMPORTDATA("https://www.stats.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Annual-enterprise-survey/Annual-enterprise-survey-2021-financial-year-provisional/Download-data/annual-enterprise-survey-2021-financial-year-provisional-size-bands.csv")

REGEXTRACT:

This function can extract data that matches a pattern of regular expressions.

=REGEXEXTRACT(text, regular_expression)

• text the text you want to search for in the example
• regular_expression. the pattern you want to match

For example:

=REGEXEXTRACT("1 pound = $1.40", "\$\d+\.\d+")

Note: These features may not work for every site. It depends on the layout of the site. In case you need more data, you can refer to web scraping tutorials using Python and Java or use web scraping tools like Nanonets.

Let’s try extracting an HTML table in Google Sheets. We’ll try to scrape the table from Wikipedia’s list of Academy Award-winning films.

1. Open Google Sheets.
2. In a new cell, type =IMPORTHTML(url,query,index)

1. Our code becomes

 =IMPORTHTML("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Academy_Award-winning_films","table",1) 

=IMPORTHTML(“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Academy_Award-winning_films”,”table”,1)

will scratch the first table on the Wikipedia page

3. Check the results

How to scrape data using Google Sheets web scraping?

Let’s see how to scrape titles, descriptions, H1 and more using Google Sheets. To start H1 scraping with Google Sheets, we’ll use the IMPORTXML function for this particular Nanonets page. Here are the steps.

• Open a new or existing Google Sheet.
• Enter the following formula in the cell:

=IMPORTXML(“https://nanonets.com/image-to-text”, “//h1/text()”)

• To extract the H1 tag, use the following XPath expression: //h1/text()
• To extract the title tag, use the following XPath expression: //title/text()
• To extract the meta description tag, use the following XPath expression: //meta[@name=”description”]/@content:
• Use the following XPath expression to extract all links on a page: //a/@href

Press Enter and Google Sheets will automatically delete the data and display it in the selected cell.

You can then copy the formula to other cells to scrape additional data from the same or different web pages.

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Extract text from any web page with just one click. Go to the Nanonets site scraper, add the URL and click “Scrape” and instantly download the site text as a file. Try it now for free!

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What are the disadvantages of using Google Sheets Web Scraper?

• Google Sheets has limited features. When it comes to complex layouts, it cannot handle dynamic content.
• There may be data inconsistencies when scraping data using Google Sheets web scraping formulas.
• When collecting data from websites, you may inadvertently scrape sensitive or confidential information. This can raise privacy and security concerns, especially if scraped data is shared or stored in an insecure location.

Hint. Google Sheets Web Scraping is a great alternative for simple web scraping tasks like meta titles, lists or table extraction. For complex tasks, you should use web scraping tools.

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