HTML code to search data from Excel

Except using the Find function in Excel, actually you can create your own search box for searching needed values easily. This article will show you two methods to create your own search box in Excel in details.

Create your own search box with Conditional Formatting to highlight all searched results
Create your own search box with formulas to list all searched results

Create your own search box with Conditional Formatting to highlight all searched results

You can do as follows to create your own search box by using the Conditional Formatting function in Excel.

1. Select the range with data you need to search by the search box, then click Conditional Formatting > New Rule under the Home tab. See screenshot:

2. In the New Formatting Rule dialog box, you need to:

2.1) Select Use a formula to determine which cells to format option in the Select a Rule Type box;

2.2) Enter formula =ISNUMBER(SEARCH($B$2,A5)) into the Format values where this formula is true box;

2.3) Click the Format button to specify a highlighted color for the searched value;

2.4) Click the OK button.

Notes:

1. In the formula, $B$2 is a blank cell you need to use it as a search box, and A5 is the first cell of your selected range you need to search values within. Please change them as you need.

2. The formula is not case-sensitive.

Now the search box is created, when typing search criteria into the search box B2 and press the Enter key, all matched values in the specified range are searched out and highlighted immediately as below screenshot shown.

Create your own search box with formulas to list all searched results

Supposing you have a data list locating in range E4:E23 which you need to search, if you want to list all matched values in another column after searching with your own search box, you can try the below method.

1. Select a blank cell which is adjacent to cell E4, here I select cell D4, then enter formula =IFERROR(SEARCH($B$2,E4)+ROW()/100000,"") into the formula bar, and then press the Enter key. See screenshot:

Note: In the formula, $B$2 is the cell you need to use it as a search box, E4 is the first cell of the data list you need to search. You can change them as you need.

2. Keep selecting cell E4, then drag the Fill Handle down to cell D23. See screenshot:

3. Now select cell C4, enter formula =IFERROR(RANK(D4,$D$4:$D$23,1),"") into the Formula Bar, and press the Enter key. Select cell C4, then drag the Fill Handle down to C23. See screenshot:

4. Now you need to fill range A4:A23 with series number which increase by 1 from 1 to 20 as below screenshot:

5. Select a blank cell you need to display the searched result, enter formula =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(A4,$C$4:$E$23,3,FALSE),"") into the Formula Bar and press the Enter key. Keep selecting cell B4, drag the Fill Handle down to B23 as below screenshot shown.

From now on, when entering data in searching box B2, all matched values will be listed in range B4:B23 as below screenshot shown.

Note: this method is not case-sensitive.

Whether a digital native or immigrant, you probably know the basic functions of Excel inside out. With Excel, it is easy to accomplish simple tasks like sorting, filtering and outlining data and making charts based on them. When the data are highly structured, we can even perform advanced data analysis using pivot and regression models in Excel.

But the problem is, how can we extract scalable data and put them into Excel efficiently? This would be an extremely tedious task if done manually by repetitive typing, searching, copying, and pasting. So, how can we achieve automated data extraction and scraping from websites to Excel?

In this article, you can learn 3 ways to scrape data from websites to Excel to save your time and energy.

Disclaimer:

There are many ways to scrape data from websites using programming languages like PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, etc. But here we'll just talk about how to scrape data from websites into Excel without coding.

Get Web Data Using Excel Web Queries

Except for transforming data from a web page manually by copying and pasting, Excel Web Queries are used to quickly retrieve data from a standard web page into an Excel worksheet. It can automatically detect tables embedded in the web page's HTML. Excel Web queries can also be used in situations where a standard ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) connection gets hard to create or maintain. You can directly scrape a table from any website using Excel Web Queries.

Here list the simple steps on how to extract website data with Excel web queries. Or you can check out from this link: http://www.excel-university.com/pull-external-data-into-excel/.

1. Go to Data > Get External Data > From Web.

2. A browser window named “New Web Query” will appear.

3. In the address bar, write the web address.

If the methods mentioned above don't help, you can check out more free web scraping tools until you find the satisfied one.

Outsource Your Web Scraping Project

If time is your most valuable asset and you want to focus on your core businesses, outsourcing such complicated work to a proficient web scraping team that has experience and expertise might be the best option. Data scraping is difficult to scrape data from websites due to the fact that the presence of anti-scraping bots will restrain the practice of web scraping. A proficient web scraping team would help you get data from websites in a proper way and deliver structured data to you in an Excel sheet, or in any format you need.

Here are some customer stories that how Octoparse web scraping service helps businesses of all sizes.

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Video: Create Your First Scraper with Octoparse 8.X