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I am trying to recreate the product catalogue for an ecommerce site as an excel table. Basically i want to fetch product name, brand name, price, and any associated tags and store it in an excel table. I was wondering if there is a web crawler that i cna use to automate this process. I want one that preferable has a GUI where i can set rules.

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If you want to import a catalogue from an e-commerce site into an Excel sheet, you can use Exxcel Web Queries. How to use them and how flexible they will be depends on your version of Excel, but you can have an overview of how to do this with stock quotes in Excel 2003 here, or here for Excel 2007. Advanced tips on query modifications can be found here, but it won't be GUI-based.

Main steps for importing Web data into Excel

The main steps are (make sure a new workbook in Excel is open and your system is connected to the Internet):

  1. In the Data tab, click From Web.
  2. In the New Web Query dialog box, type the URL or web address into the Address text box for the Web page from which you want to pull the information.
  3. When you are finished typing the URL or Web address, click Go.

Depending on the speed on your Internet connection, you'll eventually see the web page you designated displayed in the New Web Query dialog box.

Yellow arrows display next to any table that you can pull from the Web site into your worksheet. (If these arrows don't display, click the Show Icons button).

Now you're ready to decide which data you want to import.

  1. To select a table or section, click the yellow arrow so the arrow changes to a green check mark. (You can also opt to import the entire Web page by clicking the Click To Select The Entire Web Page arrow in the upper-left corner of the page.)
  2. When you're finished selecting the table(s), click the Import button at the bottom of the New Query dialog box.
  3. In the Import Data dialog box, click Existing Worksheet if you want to insert the information in the currently displayed worksheet; click New Worksheet if you want to create a new workbook.
  4. Finally, designate the upper-left corner of the range where you want the Web query information to appear and click OK.

Now Excel will display the Getting Data message in a worksheet cell. The External Data toolbar displays so you can use it to manipulate the data.

For example, you can click the Refresh Data or Edit Query buttons to update the table's information or change the query's structure.

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