Comments on: Web lookup using Excel

By: S Anand

S Anand — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:15:21 +0000

@dat: Have a look at http://www.awszone.com/ for examples on other parameters.

By: dat

dat — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:10:56 +0000

useful article!
Btw, how do I retrieve other info from amazon (published date, sales rank, customer review, etc)???
thanks

By: rick sherrin

rick sherrin — Thu, 03 May 2007 18:00:00 +0000

Hi, I work at a public library, in the acquisitions department. The majority of the work is manually keying in order information (that is available electronically elsewhere). I read your article about using Excel to retrieve amazon information. This is something that would be very useful to our library and would make my job easier. I have a little excel knowledge, but I have no experience with visual basic or xml, etc. So although it looks straightforward, it is still out of my reach. I would like to be able to enter a column of ISBN numbers in one column, and retrieve title, author, publisher, price, reviews, synopsis, cover image, in adjacent columns. I would appreciate your help if you would give me an example of how I could easily do this. Thanks Rick

By: S Anand

S Anand — Thu, 03 May 2007 14:16:20 +0000

Good point, Saurabh! Web Query does make getting stuff out of HTML very easy. My function operates in a different domain, though. It can access XML, which Web Query won’t, but can’t access HTML, which Web Query does. I’m planning a few more posts on how to extend this concept… that will explain what I mean.

By: Saurabh

Saurabh — Thu, 03 May 2007 13:38:56 +0000

There is a simpler way as well. Use Data->Import External Data->New Web Query. While this is not as powerful as the user defined function that you have created, but definitely a good starting point for lesser geeks I use this, for example, to have a dashboard kind of view for the status of the multiple projects that I handle at my work. We rely heavily on Microsoft Sharepoint at work, and using the Web Query option, I can easily get a snapshot of the status of various projects. Same can also fetch shareprices from various websites.