How to Extract Data With Google Sheets? (No Code Needed)

What if I told you it's possible to collect web data without coding skills? The secret is - using Google Sheets for web scraping. To extract the data, simply create and open a Google Sheets file. Then, select a website you want to scrape. For this tutorial, we'll target quotes.toscrape.com  - a website made for web scraping. Let’s start with scraping text elements. For this, we’ll use an IMPORTXML function. It allows you to import structured data from XML, HTML, CSV, and other data types on the

web. Let's see how it works in practice. Choose a cell and enter the IMPORTXML function. In the brackets, paste the link to your targeted website. Then, add an XPath query that points to the data you need. To find the XPath, right-click anywhere on your targeted website's page and choose Inspect. Hover your mouse over the HTML code until the element you want is highlighted. You can copy the XPath by navigating to the element class, right-clicking on it, choosing Copy and XPath. Or, you can choos

e Copy Full XPath if you're using a Chrome browser. Alternatively, you can enter the XPath by hand. You'll find a blog post in our video description explaining how to do that. Finally, add a locale and specify the language and region for parsing data. It's optional but extremely useful when a website offers dynamic content. Once you hit enter or return, the extracted data loads in the cell. To make web scraping more efficient, you can write the URL and XPath in separate cells and reuse them by l

inking to the cells in a function. To extract tables, we'll use the IMPORTHTML function. Like in this example, I scraped  a list of cat breeds from Wikipedia. The principle is similar: in the brackets,  add your URL and the element's name. In this case, it's a "table" and an index. To find the index, Inspect the page and then count the number of “table” elements from the top of the HTML document. Run the function, and you’ll get a clean and formatted table with all the information from the websi

te. You might also want to import data from XML or RSS feeds. Then, the IMPORTFEED function comes to the rescue. Let's say we want information from the New York Times website. Then, in the brackets, we'll have to specify the URL of the RSS feed and what exactly we want to retrieve. In this case, we choose all items, including titles, descriptions, authors, and dates. Then, a Boolean statement tells if we want to extract headers and, finally, the number of items we want to extract. Keep in mind t

hat string values, like a URL or a query, should be listed  in quotation marks. Other parameters, like booleans or integers, don't need them. Run the function, and that's it. Remember that every time you hit "enter,"  it counts as a real request. Meaning, with high-scale scraping, IP blocks are a very real risk. Plus, if it's your first time scraping, finding XPaths can also be a challenging task.To make your life easier, use our Web Scraping API. With our product, you'll only need to  copy the

URL and adjust the parameters via our user-friendly dashboard, and the rest  will be done for you. Don't believe me? Try it yourself with our free trial. The link is in the video description.