How to Use Excel VBA to Scrape Data from Multiple Webpages with Cell Values as Variables

Описание: Learn how to leverage Excel VBA to iterate over multiple webpages for web scraping, using column cell values as dynamic variables.
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This video is based on the question https://stackoverflow.com/q/66609398/ asked by the user 'Sweepster' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/910737/ ) and on the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/66649393/ provided by the user 'QHarr' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/6241235/ ) at 'Stack Overflow' website. Thanks to these great users and Stackexchange community for their contributions.

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Scraping Web Data with Excel VBA: A Step-by-Step Guide

Web scraping is an incredibly useful technique that allows users to extract data from websites. If you're using Excel, the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) feature is incredibly powerful for automating this process. In this post, we will explore how to set up a web scraper in Excel VBA that iterates through several webpages using values stored in a column. This makes it easier to extract data for multiple items like stock prices or analyst estimates.

The Challenge

Suppose you have a list of stock symbols in an Excel worksheet and you want to scrape analyst estimates from the respective URLs of these stocks from MarketWatch. The problem arises when you want to set up the scraper to use each stock symbol as a variable in the URL instead of manually entering each one.

For example, you want to scrape information from:

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Instead of hardcoding the stock symbol into your code, you prefer a solution where each symbol is taken from a list in your workbook, like this:

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However, you don't know how to iterate through this list and scrape the data accordingly. Not to worry—we’ve got a solution!

The Solution

Let's break down the solution into clear steps to automate our data scraping using Excel VBA.

Step 1: Read Symbols into an Array

The very first step is to read the stock symbols listed in the first column of "Sheet1" into an array. By determining the last populated row, we can effectively pull in the data.

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Step 2: Loop Through the Array

Next, we will loop through each stock symbol and replace the placeholder in the URL with the actual symbol for each request as follows:

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This step allows our URL to dynamically change based on the stock symbol currently being processed.

Step 3: Handle Results and Update the Worksheet

As each webpage is scraped, the results need to be stored in an array to later output them all at once. Below is a structured way to manage results with a helper function that ensures efficient data handling:

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Step 4: Error Handling

Proper error handling is crucial. If there is an issue with a request, it's good practice to capture the error and still write out the results submitted up to that point. For instance:

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Full VBA Script

Now, here’s the complete VBA subroutine you can utilize for your scraper:

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Conclusion

In this guide, we explored how to effectively set up a web scraper in Excel using VBA to iterate over multiple webpages. By automating tasks with cell values as placeholders, users can efficiently gather data without manual input. This can be applied to various web data scraping projects to save valuable time and effort. Happy scraping!