Guide
A table from a website, into Excel with its columns.
Select, copy, paste — and everything lands in column A, or the numbers come out as text, or half the rows are missing. Here is the one-click way that keeps the columns, and when Excel's own import, Wikipedia's tables and Google Sheets' IMPORTHTML will or won't do the job.
The one-click way
Open the page
Any page with a table, a list or a grid of cards. Let it finish loading.
Click the Magic Scraper icon
The table is already found and outlined on the page, with the columns named from its headers. More than one table? Press Another table.
Press XLSX
An Excel file with real columns lands in your downloads. CSV and JSON are there too, or Copy to paste straight into a sheet.
Video: Scrape any web table to Excel — free Chrome extension (no code). It plays from YouTube when you press play.
Why pasting puts everything in one column
A copy from a browser carries text, and only sometimes the table around it. Many sites draw their "tables" with boxes rather than a real HTML table, so there are no cells for Excel to keep. Others load the rows with JavaScript, so what you selected isn't what the page is made of. Either way Excel gets lines of text and puts them all in column A.
Reading the page's structure, rather than its text, is what fixes it: the extension sees the repeating rows — a real table, a list or a grid of cards — and writes one column per field.
Excel's own "From Web"
On Windows, Data → From Web (Power Query) imports real HTML tables from a public address, and can refresh them. It is a good choice for a simple, public table that you want to update inside Excel.
It can't see rows a page adds with JavaScript after loading, lists of cards that aren't tables, pages behind a login, or a table spread over many pages. Those are the cases the extension is for.
A table across many pages
Results split over pages 1, 2, 3…? On the Crawl tab press Auto-detect "Next" and Start crawling. Every page is added to the same table, with a pause between pages, until there are no more. Free, with no page limit. Infinite scroll and "Load more" buttons work the same way. Stuck on page one? See why scrapers stop at page 1.
Wikipedia tables
Open the article and click the icon. Articles often hold several tables; press Another table until the outline sits on the one you want, then export. Column headers come from the table's own, and each linked name keeps its link in a column beside it, so you can follow it later.
Need something from each linked article — a company's revenue, a city's population? Drill-down opens each one and adds its facts box as columns.
Google Sheets: when IMPORTHTML doesn't work
=IMPORTHTML(url, "table", 1) pulls a table into a sheet and is perfect when
it works. It fails when the table is built by JavaScript, when the page has no real
<table>, when the number points at the wrong table, or when the site
refuses Google's servers — the cell shows an error or the wrong data.
Then export a CSV with the extension — it reads the page as your browser shows it — and bring it in with File → Import, or press Copy and paste into the sheet.
Reasonable questions
Why does pasting a web table into Excel put everything in one column?
The browser copies text, not a table, when the page draws its table with divs instead of a real HTML table, or when you copy more than the table. Excel then has nothing to split on. An extension that reads the page's structure exports real columns instead.
Can Excel import a table from a website by itself?
Yes: Data → From Web (Power Query) reads real HTML tables from a public address. It can't see tables built by JavaScript after the page loads, lists that are cards rather than tables, or pages behind a login.
How do I copy a Wikipedia table to Excel?
Open the article, click the Magic Scraper icon, press Another table until the outline sits on the one you want, then XLSX. Footnote markers stay in the cells if the table has them; filter or rename columns before exporting.
Why is IMPORTHTML not working in Google Sheets?
IMPORTHTML only sees what the server sends before any JavaScript runs, only real tables and lists, and some sites refuse Google's servers. If the cell shows an error or the wrong table, export a CSV with an extension instead and import it with File → Import.
Does it work on a Mac?
Yes. The extension runs in Chrome or Edge on macOS the same way; open the exported file in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets.