How to copy a table from a website into Excel or Google Sheets

Four ways that work, from the one you already know to the fastest. Each has a place: pick by how often you do it and how messy the page is.

1. Select, copy and paste

Drag the mouse over the table, press Ctrl+C (⌘+C on a Mac), click a cell in your sheet and press Ctrl+V.

Good for: a small, simple table you need once.

Where it breaks: the selection grabs text around the table or misses rows; long tables are hard to select; links, colours and fonts come along (use Paste Special → Text or Keep Text Only in Excel or Ctrl+Shift+V in Google Sheets to drop them); footnote marks like [1] stick to the numbers; and numbers written as "1,234.56" may stay text if your spreadsheet uses a decimal comma.

2. Excel: Data → From Web

In Excel for Windows (Microsoft 365, 2016 and later), open Data → Get Data → From Other Sources → From Web, paste the page address and press OK. Excel lists the tables it finds; pick one and press Load. Later, Refresh reloads the latest data.

Good for: a public page you want to refresh regularly.

Where it breaks: pages behind a login, pages that build their tables with JavaScript after loading, and sites that block automated requests; Excel then finds nothing or the wrong table. It also takes a few clicks each time you start from a new page.

3. Google Sheets: IMPORTHTML

In a cell, type =IMPORTHTML("https://example.com/page", "table", 1). The last number is the position of the table on the page: 1 for the first, 2 for the second, and so on. Sheets fills the cells and refreshes the data from time to time.

Good for: a public page you want to keep linked in a shared sheet.

Where it breaks: the same limits as Excel's From Web (no logins, no tables drawn by JavaScript), you have to guess the table number on pages with many tables, and large pages can return "Could not fetch URL" or time out.

4. A browser extension: one click on the page you are reading

An extension works on the page exactly as you see it in your browser, so it also works after you log in and on tables built with JavaScript. We make one, Ordelio Table Copy (free, no row limits):

1. Open the page and click the extension icon (or press Alt+Shift+Y). It lists every table on the page, the biggest first; hover one and it lights up.
2. Press Copy and paste into Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice or Numbers: every cell lands in its own column. Or press CSV to save a file that opens with accents intact (UTF-8, with the separator your spreadsheet expects).

It also turns "1,234.56" into "1234,56" when your spreadsheet uses a decimal comma (and the other way round), repeats merged cells so columns stay aligned, and removes footnote marks like [1].

Where it breaks: it copies what is on the page now, so tables split across several pages need one copy per page, and it does not refresh by itself like methods 2 and 3.

Get Table Copy for Microsoft Edge Chrome and Firefox versions: in review.

Which one to use

In short: for data you track over time on a public page, link it with From Web or IMPORTHTML. For everything else, especially pages you have to log in to, copy it from the page you are reading.

Found a table that none of these methods handles? Tell us, we read every message.