Linking Web Data with Excel

YahooGoogle · Dec 30, 2017

I have a question with regards to pulling data from the web. I am a huge statistics and basketball fan, so naturally I love to analyze each individual players stats. I have set up a spreadsheet to track each individual players stats per game played, but admittedly it's way too much work to go in every night and update each player's stats individually one by one. For the sake of keeping things somewhat simple, let's say I have my spreadsheet set up as follows (for player LeBron James):

Column A (date) Column B (opp) Column C (mins played) Column D (pts scored)

Jan 1 Det
Jan 4 Tor

Jan 9 LA

Jan 10 Hou

The website I usually use to update the stats for each player is (again, this link is for LeBron James only):

https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/nba/players/3704/gamelog

(In terms of my example above and website link I provided, it would be "Min" which would be the 5th column from the left, and the "Pts" which is the last column on the far right)

Is there a way to pull these figures from this site after every game that is played? I can insert the game date & opponent from ahead of time so all I want to know is how many minutes James played and how many points he scored during each game he plays. The problem however, is that sometimes players get the night off, or get hurt, etc, so, based on my example above, he may play Jan 1 and 4th, sit out the 9th, and play again on the 10th. So if I have all of Cleveland's games already listed on my worksheet (date and opponent), is there a way that excel can look at that web link and only return values for the games where James has actually played? In the web link I provided, if a player doesn't play in a certain game, it will not be listed at all, so even though my worksheet will have Jan 3 game vs LA listed, the website won't have it listed , so would it cause a problem? Maybe it can be linked up via the game date (if it finds a certain date it returns the values, if not it doesn't return anything)?

I am completely at a loss in terms of linking up Excel with the web so I am hopeful someone will be able to help me out....also, assuming that this can be set up with Excel, would it update automatically the next day once I open the spreadsheet, or would I have to do something manually to run the updated figures every time I run the worksheet?

Thanks in advance

RobertSF · Dec 30, 2017

Is there a way to pull these figures from this site after every game that is played?

In Excel 2016, you can go to Data, Get External Data, From Web. Here's a video on how to do it in Excel 2003. Unfortunately, how well it works depends on the website, and I could not get it to work on the link you provided.

So if I have all of Cleveland's games already listed on my worksheet (date and opponent), is there a way that excel can look at that web link and only return values for the games where James has actually played?

Darn, that's a seriously non-trivial application. Some websites provide APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that allow third parties to submit queries and extract data. By using the API, the third party essentially connects to the website's database and does not scrape data from rendered web pages. In the absence of an API, we are left with no solution but to scrape data from rendered pages, and while this is possible, it's also very unreliable. The problem is that scraping data from a rendered page relies on how the page is structured, but websites tend to change over time, and changes in the website code then break the code that scrapes the web page.

I'm not a sports fan, so I don't know, but perhaps there is a website, a project, some open source thing, that collects and publishes game scores in a downloadable, Excel-readable format. If not, I think your best bet is to copy and paste the scores tables from the website into Excel. Once you have that in Excel, then you can start thinking about how to process it to achieve the results you want.

YahooGoogle · Dec 31, 2017

Thanks for the input RobertSF. I'll dig around and see if there is something online that collects and publishes this info in a downloadable, Excel-readable format (like you suggested).

Linking Web Data with Excel

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Linking Web Data with Excel

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