Web Scraping for Non-Programmers: 3 easy Tools to Extract Data from Websites

If you work with data and use the web as your main source for datasets, then you might have heard the words "web scraping". If you have not come across it yet, well surely you happened to find some interesting data on the web, but no available download options. No csv file or excel download. Nothing. Nada. Niente. And even your desperate copy-and-paste attempt has failed you. This is where web scraping comes in handy.

This post is about introducing web scraping, and I am going to present 3 tools anyone of us can use to "scrape" the web. Two of them can be used directly from your browser, while the other option is available through Google Spreadsheets. But, most importantly, they are all free, very quick and easy to use and do not require programming skills.

All right, let's define the topic of this post first. What the heck is Web Scraping?