Internet and Excel

Learning Outcomes

  • Use internet tools to enhance Excel workbooks.

Rowan Retail Store #2 is using Excel to plan their campaign for the Q3 sales campaign. The campaign for this store is to create a loyalty program and start with selling more dairy groceries. Like Word and PowerPoint, the same skills apply to copy, paste images and address from the internet. There is one other feature that is unique to Excel which we’ll go over.

Maurice has opened his Q3 sales campaign Excel file and wants to insert pictures of each store in the table he has made. He searches the web for the photos by first clicking the Insert tab and Online Pictures button. After finding the second store’s photo, he clicks the Insert button and then resizes the photo in the worksheet.

A Microsoft Excel sheet for a sales campaign is displayed in the cells. A bing search for store 2 is displayed in front of the excel spreadsheet.

A Microsoft Excel sheet for a sales campaign is displayed in the cells. An image of a store has been inserted over the excel sheet.

He finds and inserts the third store’s photo and now his table is complete. He wants to keep a reference for a webpage next to the table. With a browser open to the website, Maurice copies the web address and goes back to his Excel workbook. He selects a cell and pastes the address directly into the workbook.

Practice Question

Bonus Advanced Integration

Maurice wants to conduct research on current dairy prices to help him decide on the sales percentage. Excel has a function to allow tables from websites to be imported into a worksheet. Maurice already knows the website he wants to follow (http://www.dairy.com/market-prices).

He takes the following steps to set up the table in a new workbook tab.

  1. First, he clicks on the Data tab, then selects the Get Data > From Other Sources > From Web.

A Microsoft Excel sheet for a sales campaign is displayed in the cells. The data tab in the ribbon menu has been selected. A dropdown menu from the get data has opened and the option to get data from other sources has been selected leading to another dropdown menu. The option to get data from the web has been selected.

  1. He then types in his webpage address into the dialog box and clicks OK.

A blank Microsoft Excel sheet is open. A search dialog box has been opened and a link has been inserted from where to get the new data from.

  1. This sends Excel out looking for the website and its data. It then displays a dialog box with the information it can read. Maurice selects Table 1 and clicks the Load button.

A blank Microsoft Excel sheet is open. The search dialog box has returned several results but the option to select and load table one is demonstrated.

  1. The data table from the website is now pulled into his spreadsheet. Hooray!

An excel sheet is open with the newly loaded data table inserted.

  1. Maurice wants to make sure he has the most up-to-date information. He clicks the Data tab > Properties button > Query Properties button.

An excel sheet is open with the newly loaded data table inserted. There are three green arrows, the first one is pointing at the data tab in the ribbon menu. The second is pointing at the properties button and the third is pointing at the query properties button.

  1. A new dialog box opens and he checks the box to Refresh every 60 minutes. He can change this to whatever time frame he desires to make sure he always has updated data.

An excel sheet is open with the newly loaded data table inserted. The query properties dialog box is open and there are three green arrows displayed. The first one points at the option to set a time to refresh the table, the second one shows that the time has been set to 60 minutes and the third arrow shows that the ok button has been selected.

  1. The data table now refreshes and Maurice can conduct his research on the market price of dairy commodities.

Practice Question

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