CodeX: xSkrape for Excel

xSkrape for Excel Add-in (Desktop)

xSkrape for Excel offers Office users access to some new Excel functions which do simple yet powerful things. In particular, new functions include:

WebGetSingle - Data returned from the URL address (could be HTML, JSON, CSV, etc.) is queried for a specific scalar (single) value and returned by the function into an Excel cell.
WebGetMultiple - Data returned from the URL address is queried for multiple scalar values and returned by the function to Excel as an array which spans multiple cells. (This offers a way to optimize data access if you know there are multiple data elements of interest that could be extracted into adjacent cells.)
WebGetTable - Data returned from the URL address is searched for tabular data; if there are multiple possible tabular results, an optional parameter can be used to define criteria by which the exact table of interest is isolated. Data is returned as a two-dimensional array which translates into one or more Excel rows and columns (a fixed size in both cases).
WebGetDynamicTable - Similar to WebGetTable except the size of the tabular data is not defined up-front: it's pushed into Excel cells adjacent to the cell containing the function call (options control what "adjacent" means, with the default being the cell immediately below the function call). This allows for pulling in data for which you may not know the number of rows and/or columns ahead of time.
WebGetSingleFromTable - A combination of WebGetTable and WebGetSingle: locate tabular data and apply an aggregation function (minimum, maximum, average, first, etc.) over the data, returning a scalar value.

There are some important differences with functionality already in Excel and other tools as well:

Parameterizing the xSkrape function calls can be done using intuitive cell references, like every other Excel function.
You can control the format of the output versus having to "take what you get."
Our query language for locating data of interest is flexible and can withstand many types of change in the source page's structure without requiring code changes (eg. solutions that rely exclusively on XPath queries will break if additional HTML element nesting is added or changed in the document tree below where the data is located). It's also far easier to understand and derive than relying exclusively on XPath queries. (We do, however, offer XPath as one way to reference your data of interest.)
More "dials" are exposed by xSkrape (and expect even more over time). Check out our on-line documentation for details.
Performance: compared to the Web Data Source, we have examples of where xSkrape performs much better due to its multi-threaded parsing engine and leveraging of local compute resources.

Page Explorer is a key way to understand the source data to be "scraped" - and it offers possible suggestions on how to use the available xSkrape filters to get exactly what you want.
Access remote data in place - no need to make a local copy, keeping it live.
Off-line scenarios are supported, mainly via WebGetDynamicTable. (Expect to see some new persistent caching options in up-coming releases.)
Configuration options: we have a number of settings can be tweaked such as for "Timeout" and "ErrorHandling"; it also offers a place for us to add plenty of additional functionality without changing our method signatures.
Cost effectiveness: if you never need to upgrade, it's a one-time up-front cost versus the never-ending subscription costs of some products!