I purchased SEO Tools and am very happy with the product.
Question - Does SEO Tools use any VBA code? My guess is "no" since the Excel workbooks I have created that use SEO TooIs are saved as "xlsx" and not "xlsm".
But I am interested in understanding the various ways to do web data scraping within Excel,
and would like to learn about the different techniques that can be used.
Thank you.
Hi,
SeoTools is written in C# and does not contain any VBA code. It is possible to use the Seotools formulas within VBA, here are some examples:
https://seotoolsforexcel.com/working-with-vba/
I have personally worked a lot with VBA and it does some web-scraping but the language does not have the same power as .Net and other alternatives. The benefit is that you get better control over the worksheet and can write ad-hoc solutions quickly.
One big drawback with VBA in terms of scraping is the IE object which is getting increasingly less support by websites. So, if you wish to control the webpage to handle javascript, scrolling or button clicks, I would go for a Python-Excel library.
SeoTools itself is not open-source, but you are more than welcome to write custom connectors. We host them here and copy-pasting will get you a long way. With a bit of training, you can write scrapers very quickly.
Here is a non-finnished guide of Connector-building.