Your first =IMPORTFROMWEB() function

Let’s learn how to run the IMPORTFROMWEB() function in Google Sheets and start scraping webdata.
You feel more confortable discovering it on a video? Check it out here

Preliminary steps

Install the add-on: if not installed yet, go to the install page.

Activate the add-on: when opening a new spreadsheet, don’t forget to activate the ImportFromWeb add-on.

The function basics

The =IMPORTFROMWEB( ) function requires 2 parameters (or arguments) to extract data:

the data source, i.e. an URL that describes the source of your data
the selector, i.e. the path to the data you want to import

So, extracting data is as easy as typing:

=IMPORTFROMWEB("https://www.example.com", some_selectors)

A selector can be either:

a generic selector (title, h1, metaTitle…) — click here to get the full list of generic selectors
a built-in selector — designed for some mainstream websites such as Amazon, Yahoo Finance, Google Maps…
An XPath or a CSS selector

More info on selectors here

Like any other spreadsheet functions, the arguments can be either written in quotation marks, or by referring to a range of cell(s) that contain them:

=IMPORTFROMWEB("https://www.example.com", "selector 1")

=IMPORTFROMWEB(A1, B1:B5)

In Google Sheets, according to your locale settings, you may have to use commas or semicolons to separate parameters. Comma is usually the notation used in English speaking countries.

Let’s try the function!

Extract the title of a Wikipedia page

For this example, we’ll take the Empire State Building page and will retrieve its page title.

=IMPORTFROMWEB("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Building","title")

Exactly the same way, we can pull any other data from the page, such as its h2 content or its meta title (using the selector “h2” or “metaTitle”)

Extract any Amazon product details

In this example, we will extract the title, price and rating from 3 Amazon products in your spreadsheet.

1.1. Select in the 1^st argument the range of cells containing the Amazon products URL
In our case A2:A4

1.2. Select in the 2nd argument the selectors from the Amazon built-in selectors list, in our example “title”, “price” and “rating”.
We write them in the following range of cells B1:D1

1.3. Validate your formula and voilà!