Is it possible to get data from a webpage in real-time to an excel file

Question

I want to develop an Excel tool that would serve as a monitoring tool for our floor agents.

The only thing we currently have is a dashboard to examine the status of all agents and the lengths of their status or calls; we do not currently have an exclusive WFM tool that would monitor and call out agents with their activities and productivity. This is a web-based dialer viewer that simply displays agents' current statuses and doesn't alert us if an agent exceeds the limits we've set for wrap-up time, break time, or lunchtime.

To fill the table with the data I require, such as the name of the agent, their current status, and the current length of the call, I currently have an excel file that looks up values from another sheet.

The additional sheet I stated before is a blank sheet onto which I would paste all the information from the dialer's webpage. In essence, I'm just using the copy-paste method to copy and paste the entire contents of our dialer's webpage onto the blank Excel sheet I generated, where the table I established will find all the data I setup from that sheet.

Even though I really don't know enough, I attempted Data>Get Data>From Web and got nothing.

I tried pasting the website address, but nothing appears to come up.

I am aware, as I've already stated, that I don't really know enough to use this strategy, and perhaps I need to learn some fundamentals.

What I'd like to know is whether it's possible to link a website, sync its data to an excel sheet, and make it real-time so that I may have a makeshift WFM Tool to assist me to keep track of our agents' activity.

Answer 1

The conventional method of obtaining data from the Internet (Data > Get Data > From Web) does not always work. Tables on a web page can be recognised by Excel, but not always in the same manner that the human eye does.

Actually, there are two options here:

1. write a macro that parses specifically those pages from which you are currently getting data manually (“…I am just doing copy-paste method…”).
2. prepare web pages so that data from them can be automatically downloaded via Data >Get Data>From Web via standard Excel functionality. Both require programming specifically for your task.

I could, for instance, create a parser, but I would need access to the website from which you are copying and pasting.

Alternately, the web page's programmer may produce new pages using the same data in an Excel-compatible format. However, this programmer needs to be very specific about web page design.