How to insert external number from web into LibreOffice Calc Spreadsheet Cell

How to insert external number from web into LibreOffice Calc Spreadsheet Cell ?

Thanks

You may try to link your spreadsheet to external data. Go to:

Sheet > Link to external data

then enter the url of the page you want to connect with.
then select from the Available Table/Ranges the one you need, the names of the tables may not be self-explaining, so you may need to try a little bit to find the one you need.
The table you selected will be copied into your spreadsheet and the program will ask you to update the values every time you open you file, or every XX seconds, if you choose that option at the bottom of the dialog.

Have you tried copy and paste?

Or are you expecting a formula to access data from a web page in the same way it gets a number from a cell like A1?

You can access data from another sheet, and maybe from another loaded Calc sheet. But how would anyone program a general ‘fetch me a number from this URL’ formula?

Calc would need to be capable of loading, decoding and storing the HTML page. That is Writer’s job. Writer might then use regular expressions to search for all of the ‘words’ that look like a number. But how would you pick the number you are thinking of? Then there’s the problem of putting it back into the Calc sheet in the right cell.

An interesting idea, but more complex than you imagined? I don’t know of any spreadsheet program that would be capable of this. Yet. :slight_smile: Try copy and pasting the numbers you need, or collecting them in a CSV file which you can then load onto Sheet2, say.

Copy and paste (ctrl+c; ctrl+v [in Windows - don’t know about other OS]) work very well. Currently I monitor our stock portfolio by highlighting and copying a data table on a Yahoo Financial web page and then pasting the data into a Calc multipage spreadsheet. The information copied from the Yahoo web page has data on 18 individual stocks and indices with price, price change and % change pasted into the spreadsheet. How the data is handled is dependent on the web browser that you are using unless it’s only a single data point or number you’re after.

Hold down the left mouse button and highlight the wanted data on the web page, then hold the “crtl” key and press the “c”, then go to the cell on the spreadsheet and press “ctrl” and “v”. If you don’t want to do the keyboard thing, then use the right click and the drop down menu has “copy” and “paste” as selections.

It’s a very useful idea. I tried doing the same. I wanted a Calc sheet to be automatically updated with pricing info available through our distributor’s website.