5 Ways to Copy Tables from Websites (Complete Guide)

You found the perfect data table on a website, but how do you get it into Excel or Google Sheets? Copy and paste often fails, leaving you with broken formatting and messy data. In this comprehensive guide, we cover 5 proven methods to export tables from any website, ranked from easiest to most powerful.

Method 1: Browser Extension (Simplest & Fastest)

The quickest way to copy any table is using a dedicated browser extension like Table to Excel. This bypasses the formatting issues of standard copy-paste.

How it works:

1. Install Table to Excel (free).
2. Hover over any table on a webpage.
3. Click the copy button (📋) to copy to clipboard, or (⤓) to download as Excel.
4. Paste directly into Excel, Sheets, or any spreadsheet.

Method 2: The "Paste Special" Trick (No Tools)

If you don't want to install an extension, you can use Excel's slightly hidden "Paste Special" feature to clean up the data.

Steps:

1. Select the table on the website and press Ctrl+C.
2. Open Excel.
3. Right-click a cell.
4. Choose Paste Special > Match Destination Formatting (the icon with the clipboard and an 'A').

Limitations: Merged cells often break, and images are lost. It works best for very simple text tables.

Method 3: Google Sheets IMPORTHTML Function

Google Sheets has a powerful function to scrape tables from public URLs. This is great for live data that updates often.

Formula:

=IMPORTHTML("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries", "table", 1)

• URL: The page address in quotes.
• "table": Tells Sheets to look for table tags.
• 1: The index of the table (1 for the first table, 2 for the second).

Limitations: Only works on static HTML pages. Fails on sites that require login or load data via JavaScript.

Method 4: Excel "Get Data from Web"

Excel for Windows has a built-in scraper that is more powerful than copy-paste.

1. Go to Data tab > Get Data > From Web.
2. Paste the URL.
3. Excel will analyze the page and show a list of tables.
4. Select the one you want and click Load.

Method 5: Python (For Developers)

If you need to scrape thousands of tables, Python is the way to go.

import pandas as pd
tables = pd.read_html('https://example.com/data')
tables[0].to_csv('output.csv')

Comparison: Which Method is Best?

Method	Speed	Difficulty	formatting
Extension	⚡ Instant	Easy	✅ Perfect
Copy-Paste	Fast	Easy	❌ Broken
IMPORTHTML	Medium	Medium	⚠️ Basic
Python	Slow (Setup)	Hard	✅ Perfect