grabbing data from another website

[daveallston]

Good afternoon,
Thanks in advance to whoever can help me, i am very, very interested
in a solution if one can be given. I run a detailed statistical
database of sports statistics, which is required to be updated each
morning. I have dozens of tabs within the excel sheet, which, as of
right now, I manually update by going to a webpage, copying all the
data in a table, and re-pasting it in my spreadsheet. That pasted data
then auto-updates all the other tabs within the spreadsheet.

Then I save the spreadsheet as a webpage, and upload it to the net.

My question is... is there a better way I can do this, with some kind
of macro or script? Here is one of the exact pages I need the data
from: http://www.sportsline.com/nhl/stats/playersort/regularseason/yearly/NHL?&print_rows=9999

Is there a way that either:
(A) By clicking one "update" button or simply opening the excel sheet
in the morning, it will automatically grab all this data for me from
the webpage?; or even better:
(B) Can I program something in whereby it will automatically update on
its own on the web, so that I don't even have to open the spreadsheet,
update the tabs, upload, etc? Or am I dreaming?

I have very limited programming/design experience, but can figure
things out pretty easily. If someone could point me in the right
direction or give me a few sample lines to write, or info on the web
or something, I would REALLY appreciate it!

thanks so much
Dave

 

[Don Guillett]

This is the sort of thing I do often for my clients. Try right click on the
table>export to excel>set up your external query and then just refresh with
a macro that can fire manually or automatically as you said you wanted.