August 2004
Intermediate to advanced
312 pages
8h 30m
English
Content preview from Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's NotebookBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 4. Get Data from the Web
Today it is hard to remember a time when the Web didn’t matter, but it wasn’t that long ago that it didn’t even exist. Because Excel was created long before the Web, it has adapted as the Web evolved. There are now three main approaches to retrieving data from the Web:
Web queries retrieve data directly from a web page and import that data into a query table on an Excel spreadsheet. Although this was one of the first web access features added to Excel (introduced in 1997), it is still very useful.
Web services execute applications remotely over the Web to return results in XML format. The number of services available over the web is growing quickly as this standard is becoming broadly adopted. Web services provide a standardized way of exchanging parameters and retrieving results over the Web—something that is missing from web queries.
Database access over the web is now available through most database software. This technique depends on the database provider and is not covered here.
This chapter describes how to use web queries and web services to retrieve data from the Web and import it into Excel. The samples in this chapter demonstrate a variety of programming tasks with these two approaches, including:
Passing parameters
Formatting results
Getting data asynchronously
Displaying results through XML Maps
Note
Code used in this chapter and additional samples are available in ch04.xls.
Perform Web Queries
Web queries are a quick way to import ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.