Can this be done? (internet search fill in)

[Douglas Glick]

This newsgroup has been amazingly helpful to me in the past. Things
have gone well for a long time now, but here I am with a new 'need' and
a hope that it can be done.
I am trying to build an excel file for a family member that will list
movie titles and other relevant information. They would like there to
be a live link though in one column -- that is a different link for
each row/movie -- that if clicked on takes one to the imdb.com page for
that movie.
Is that possible? It would require doing a search I think at the imdb.com site.
Possible? What would the formula look like?
Thanks, Doug

 

[little_creature]

Hello, I understand you want to have list like
Little creature pretty woman (not tre)
An want people to be able to click on words pretty woman and they will be
linked to imdb.com?
Right? Than what you need to do is:
1. find your movie on imdb.com in order to get link for that particular
movie such as:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0100405/

2. type down lins you like to apper in Excel
Little creature pretty woman

3. in Excel select the cell with words pretty woman and either in context
menu (click with mouse while holding down CTRL key) pick hyperlink or you
can use the shortcut APPLE+K

4. New dialog box will appear - in line display you should see pretty woman
- that's text user will see and in line LINK TO pastethe address for that
particular movie eg http://imdb.com/title/tt0100405/ in this case

5. clik OK

Now whenever user will click on pretty woman it will move them to web
browser to http://imdb.com/title/tt0100405/

Just be aware some webpages changes from time to time so after few years the
link http://imdb.com/title/tt0100405/ can contain different information than
does today. But that's thing you cannot affect - that's done by the
webmasters and it's out of your control.

 

[Douglas Glick]

Thanks!
You have what I want almost exactly.
But what I want is a bit more complicated (and perhaps not possible).
I want to know if I can get to the webpage for a movie by having excel
search the site (say, imdb.com) for it. That way I don't have to find
the page myself for every single movie.
I don't care if I click on the movie name to get it or on a different
cell saying 'search' or whatever else.
Is that possible?
Thanks, Doug

 

[arc6th]

Here's what I would do:

I would put the IMDB search query (http://imdb.com/find?s=all&q=) in a
cell, say A1.

Put "Pretty Woman" in B1. In B2 I'd use the formula
=HYPERLINK(A1&B1,"IMDB").

 

[JE McGimpsey]

You can easily get the IMDB query page:

=HYPERLINK("http://imdb.com/find?s=all&q=" & trim(A1), "IMDB Search")

But it appears to me that to automatically find the movie's dedicated
page would require reading in and parsing the result of the query.
That's probably not hard using a macro, but I don't know how stable
IMDB's search page layout is, so I'd hesitate to go that route.