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I was just reading an article about a nifty little tool in MS Excel that allows you to populate data on a worksheet by pulling data directly from a website.  I have seen this feature before but never really saw a use for it.

Then I started thinking about SEO research and how it can be a pain to insert and format data into an excel sheet from a website.  This is tradionally a fairly manual task as it is usually not just a matter of cutting and pasting. 

As an example of one use, I played around with importing keyword data from Digitalpoint.  Sometimes we use this data to send reports to clients and to create proposals/strategies.  There are some other tools out there like wordtracker that will send you formatted keyword lists, but the method of pulling the data for yourself into an excel sheet is very convenient and can save you time and money.

So here are the basics of it.

If you open up excel and go to DATA > IMPORT EXTERNAL DATA > NEW WEB QUERY

The Web Query window will pop up.  You then need to browse to the page that you want to pull the data from.  In this case I am going to DigitalPoints Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Once you are see the data you want to import you simply checkmark which sections you want to include.  Excel makes it pretty easy since it puts most of the sections into blocks.  One problem though is that on some tools it cannot determine which sections to pull.  I tried a few different tools and Excel had problems with about half of them.

Once you select the sections you want to import and hit execute, excel will pull the data into nice clean text, right into your excel sheet.  You can then clean it up however you need to.

A couple important things.  You can select how you want excel to pull the data in. You can have it as straight text, rich text, or with full html.

There is also one other important setting.  Excel automatically assumes that you want to refresh the data every so often and will do so.  Since you only want to pull the data once, you will want to disable that feature, so that your data doesnt change.  Of course, there may be times that you might want the data to refresh.  One example might be if you are using it to pull current rankings in google.  You could set excel up to pull the data for the top 10 sites for a specific keyword.

Here are some other uses right off the top of my head.

- Collecting backlinks data from backlinks tools.
- Collecting lists of potential link partners.
etc.. etc.. etc..

What uses can you think of?