Using Power Query to source from web (html to table?)

Brass Contributor

I am in Melbourne Australia, and have been tasked with filtering our Covid Contact sites to focus on the regions where the org I work for operates....

 

https://www.coronavirus.vic.gov.au/exposure-sites#case-alerts--public-exposure-sites

 

I had 2 solutions to the problem, depending on how the site was set up, but now they've changed set up again and I don't think I can extract a table easily.

 

Previously, they just had the sites listed in a table, so power query did the job easily. get data from web, clean it up as I wanted it, add a vlookup, job done. 

 

I'd also worked out a more convoluted way where I literally copy and pasted what was on the web page and then used formulas to get the data, but now the site has set it up differently again.

 

Is there a way to easily extract the contact site list if there isn't an obvious table for Power Query to pick up?

 

2 Replies

@Davidm54 

Afraid not, now these are dynamic tables generated by java script, PQ doesn't work with them.

Thanks Sergei, Yeah, discovered that the hard way. I did discover, after asking a web designer friend, that there are chrome extensions that can scrape them to set up tables.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/table-capture/iebpjdmgckacbodjpijphcplhebcmeop?utm_source=...

There' still a bit of manual handling to do before you get there, but It's better than what I was doing originally, and I reckon I can make it a quicker process with some more tinkering.