Good morning from sunny and freezing Colorado, where I am still hanging out after NICAR. (The mountains are as awesome as everyone says they are.)
Last week I said I would go into more detail after DownThemAll, a tool for downloading links and images from a website. This is a form of scraping – using a tool or technique to get data off a website and into a spreadsheet. (Clicking “Download” doesn’t count.)
At NICAR, I gave a presentation on Scraping without Programming – that is, how to scrape a website without having to write a line of code.
It goes over some free tools that you can just download and start using, but those tend to be problematic and hard to learn. So I included a tutorial on something more efficient but just as free – Google Sheets! You gotta see it to believe it.
Please check it out, and let me know what you think. I’m here with advice and answers, but I’d also love feedback. Alright, the last few weeks have been pretty data-heavy, so I promise we’ll do something fun and wacky next week. (Perhaps a Chrome extension that changes “Donald Trump” to “Someone with Tiny Hands”? No?)