Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Copy HTML Tables with Formatting Intact Into Excel

Anyone who's tried to copy a table from a webpage into a spreadsheet knows how difficult it is to copy the table as a table. Most of the time, all of the data is just pasted into one cell, losing all of the row and column formatting. This makes it impossible to perform any operations on the data.
TableTools is a Firefox extension that I have been looking for for a long time. It addresses this issue perfectly and has other features that allow you to manipulate tables within the browser itself. You can sort the data alphabetically, by date, by currency, or by IP address. It's a real time saver when you want to quickly look for a piece of information in a large data table.

The most useful feature, of course, is the ability to copy a table as tab-delimited text. This allows you to copy-and-paste a table with formatting intact into a spreadsheet program.

TableTools | Guide

No comments:

Post a Comment