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How Do I Extract Safari As Text That Can Be Pasted Into Excel?

I need to be able to copy a table from Safari to numbers or excel. The extension copy tables does not work well in Safari as it does not support a plain text option. The same extension works well with Chrome and Vivaldi. To use it with Safari, I would have to modify my excel macro to expand the CSV, and I’d rather not do that. Is there a different, better method, to extract a table from Safari that can be pasted into excel as plain text, preserving columns and rows ?
Thanks – Jonathan Liss

I am tracking investments via excel and the only way to get the current values is from a web site that displays the data in a table. Excel on MAC has some macro limitations and I’ve already been able to massage the table as needed, but using Safari and the copy tables extension will require even more massage.
—–
Jonathan

Comments: 4 Responses to “How Do I Extract Safari As Text That Can Be Pasted Into Excel?”

    3 years ago

    Have you tried just copying and pasting normally? No extension. It completely depends on how neat the HTML is on the website, but a well-made table in a page can be copied and then pasted into Numbers or Excel as data in cells.

    For instance, if I search Google for "NASDAQ:AAPL" it shows the Google page for AAPL stock. Under the chart I can select the 9 data points (Open, High, Low, etc) and copy. Then in Numbers I can paste and those go into the table as cells of data.

    Jonathan Liss
    3 years ago

    Gary, thank you for responding. On Monterey what you say worked with numbers, but not excel for MAC :( I did not try numbers on Catalina (my main MAC), but I know it didn't work with excel there as well. I need excel because of some macro manipulation. The problem seems to be that the first column in some rows have no data, except perhaps for a NULL character. I can debug further, perhaps write some code, but I'm lazy ..... I will just have to use Vivaldi for this and safari for everything else.

    3 years ago

    Jonathan: Funny, because I've seen this work more often on Excel than Numbers. But recent versions of Numbers have improved this function. I tried my example above in Excel and it paste in just fine. I guess maybe the site you are working with just doesn't have things set up like Excel wants.

    Jonathan Liss
    3 years ago

    Gary, for grins and giggles, I tried on Catalina, it worked with numbers, but not excel :( The financial page comes from ubs.com and is populated with javascript. I would have to use something like keyboard maestro, perhaps to unpack the fields and it is simply not worth it for me - alas, for this website I will use chrome/vivaldi with the copy tables extension.
    Thanks anyway. As an aside, need more tutorials about shortcuts :)
    Jonathan

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