How to Scrape Data from a Website

Spending too much time going to websites and manually entering data into spreadsheets? While they may seem simple, these types of tasks eat up a great deal of time, and with manual data entry, are incredibly error prone. But with a web scraping tool, you can scrape data from a website, saving your team time and reducing errors. And with the right tool, you won’t need to write a single line of code.

How to Scrape Data from a Website: Web Scraping Tutorial

Watch this example to see how Automate allows you to quickly build out an automation task to scrape data from a website. Using a combination of Automate’s native actions and the Automate Recorder, build a task that reads a list of products, then goes to multiple websites to scrape data, like price and stock information, and then write that information back to an Excel file.

Ready to learn how to web scrape? Follow along to the steps below of our web scraping tutorial to set up your first automated web scraping task. 

Step 1: Download a Trial of Automate.

Step 2: Begin by building the task in the Automate Task Builder. (If you need a basic primer on how to build Automate tasks, Automate Academy offers free video tutorials.)

Step 3: Drag the Excel Get Cells action into the Task Builder.

Step 4: Fill in the Action Properties field to perform the selected action, including the cells you want to read in, the dataset you’re going to store it to, and the cell references for the range of cells you want to select from.

Step 5: Use the Automate Recorder to quickly record web browser interactions by clicking the New Recordering or Edit button to initiate the recorder interface.

Step 6: Click the Web button in the recorder bar, and simply hover over the web page elements that you’d like to scrape data from.

Step 7: When the element you want to interact with is highlighted on the web page, click on it and Automate will add the needed step to the step recorder.

Step 8: Automate will navigate to the site, use the Site Search field to search for the selected UPC code, and compile the product name, current price, stock information, and URL into Excel.