Scraping data from Google Documents.

There are many different methods of retrieving information from online graphs or statistics based sites, some of them are simple as copying and pasting into a excel document or indeed on to any of the free online google document websites.

There is however another way of doing it, which allows a far dynamic approach to retrieving information from these sources.

For instance, open up google documents:

Set yourself up a new spreadsheet:

Find yourself a statistics based website, either have a look around Wikipedia, for example, here's one I did earlier... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Largest_populations_by_country

Type: =ImportHtml("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population", "table", 3) into the Formula area and you should recieve all the data in the spreadsheet window.

From there you can export the data as a csv file or as a text file or you can import the data into a program of the ilk of processing.

I shall discuss that method in my next post.

p.s. In order to scrape data into a google document, the formula is as follows =ImportHtml("URL", "Table", number)