Computer help. Stats to Excel

[Steve-o]

I thought I'd put this in here rather than the leftovers because it is not really about baseball.

I am trying to take stats displayed in Firefox/IE and move them into an excel spread sheet. I've tried just copying and pasting, but the formating gets screwed up (each stat is not getting a separate cell or all the information is being copied into only one cell). Does any one know a way to save these stats as a comma delineated or tab delineated file (I think it's called a csv file).

The particular stats are from this page or this page

Thanks!

[knapplc]

I was able to get both of those into a spreadsheet with simple copy/paste. You have to do a bit of work to sort them out, since they don't go straight into a table all lined up nice and neat, but that's not too difficult.

The problem you're having is a result of trying to get one kind of table to correlate to another kind. Internet stats are laid out in a table designed for viewing on web pages, not spreadsheets, so there isn't a 1:1 relationship. If you're going to grab stats off of web pages like this, you're going to have to expect to do some legwork to clean them up for use.

Are you using a Mac or a PC? What versions of FF and IE are you using? What generation of Excel?

[Steve-o]

PC.
Mozilla 2.0.0.12
IE 7.0.5730.11
Excel 2002 (I've got the latest version of office at home, if you think it will help)

It's the legwork that I wanted to avoid. I wanted to avoid having to take the time to break down a line like this:

12 41 6 17 3 1 0 8 22 2 6 2 0 .442 .537 .415

into separate cells. Maybe I can't though...

In the past I have ended up manually breaking down similar information into separate cells so that I can manipulate it. I was hoping there was a shortcut. I usually get previous years info from Lahman or Doug's, but I wanted to play with the ST stats a bit more this year.

[knapplc]

I'm kind of confused why it would be all in one line like that. Maybe it's the 2002 generation of Excel? Like I said, I did a copy/paste just now and it was separated into individual cells. You're not doing a "Paste Special" or something like that, are you? You're just doing control-c/control-v, right?

I've had that kind of stuff happen before, but never when getting stats from MLB or CBS. Usually it happens when I grab stuff from Yahoo.

If worse comes to worse, I'll try to grab those two pages for you and host the file somewhere sometime today. But it would be good for you to figure out why you're getting that all-in-one-line thing happening.

[Tavish]

Do a web query.

1. Data > Import External Data > New Web Query
2. Copy/Paste the address into the address bar.
3. Select the table you want to import.
4. ????
5. Profit!

[Steve-o]

I'm kind of confused why it would be all in one line like that. Maybe it's the 2002 generation of Excel? Like I said, I did a copy/paste just now and it was separated into individual cells. You're not doing a "Paste Special" or something like that, are you? You're just doing control-c/control-v, right?

I've had that kind of stuff happen before, but never when getting stats from MLB or CBS. Usually it happens when I grab stuff from Yahoo.

If worse comes to worse, I'll try to grab those two pages for you and host the file somewhere sometime today. But it would be good for you to figure out why you're getting that all-in-one-line thing happening.

Yup. Straight ctrl-c. (also did right click copy). I want to figure it out for the future so that I can do it. I'll try it at home during lunch and see if it copies better in a newer version of excel. I know I have had this problem in the past with other sites, so I wanted to put it out there to see if there was a workaround anyone knows about.

[AussieDodger]

Do a web query.

1. Data > Import External Data > New Web Query
2. Copy/Paste the address into the address bar.
3. Select the table you want to import.
4. ????
5. Profit!

This is Excel not underpants gnomes

[Steve-o]

Do a web query.

1. Data > Import External Data > New Web Query
2. Copy/Paste the address into the address bar.
3. Select the table you want to import.
4. ????
5. Profit!

Sweet! Thanks Tavish.

[Tavish]

Do a web query.

1. Data > Import External Data > New Web Query
2. Copy/Paste the address into the address bar.
3. Select the table you want to import.
4. ????
5. Profit!

This is Excel not underpants gnomes

The philosophy is all-encompassing.

[thedude]

You can also just cut and paste and click "text to colums" under data.