Greyhound Racing guide.

[Jimmy]

Hi,

I am fairly new to excel but I am now trying to get my head round it. I was wondering can I get a webpage to load up in excel like http://form.greyhounds.betfair.com/racingform

As I want to extract some data from it and use it in excel.?

I have tried data/import external data/new web query

But when importing it throws up an error "File cannot be opened because: Refernce to undefined'nbsp'. Line 22,Position20. <div id="tooltip">&nbsp;</div>

Thanks

Jimmy

[Dogmatic]

Hi Jimmy,

I use a Firefox add-on called Table Tools, which allows you to cut and paste tabular data from a web page into Excel. Might do what you want.

[Jimmy]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, I have given it a go and its ok but it still means cut and paste from the intenet.

I after the webpage to be displayed in excel so I can then set up a formula on the displayed webpage to calculate my lays/backs.

Thanks

Jimmy

[Jimmy]

Hi,

Someone must know as I think quite a few people on here are excel experts.

Thanks

Jimmy

[Dogmatic]

Hi Jimmy,

You don't say which version of Excel you're using, but I can import that web page in both Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 without getting the error you describe. However, that's really irrelevant because the data you want is not included in the html of the web page. Instead, in common with a lot of web sites these days, the data is loaded by a Javascript routine which runs after the page has been loaded. This is too late for Excel to see it, so you don’t get the data anyway. To see what I mean, load the web page in Firefox and then go to View/Page Source to see the html. The data you want isn’t there.

If you can find a greyhound form site that embeds the actual data in the html, you may still be able to use Excel to import the details. Alternatively, if you are an experienced Windows programmer, you can use the IWebBrowser2 interface to load the page, wait for the Javascript to run, and then parse the required information out of IDispatch interface to the document.

Other than that, I think you’re back to cut and paste!

Good luck,
Dog

[Jimmy]

Hi Dog,

Thanks for the reply, Yeah its excel 2002 which I suppose is quite old. I was after loading the the stats into excel and then have a formula. I was after something like bags beater 2. Which I use it loads the betfair site and then you click extract data and it loads the selections on the next page with a displays the select as a visual. I wanted to use my own formula through excel but if there is another waywould try and give that ago. Please see attached.

I take it thats its quite complicated to get this done.?

Cheers

Jimmy