Extract data on any website in four easy steps using Instant Data Scraper
A little while ago, I made this chart which showed how much African players in the English Premier League earn using data from Capology — a website with information on football player salaries, contracts, and the club financial accounts of the top football leagues in the world.
But getting to the final product was a slight challenge because the normal “copy and paste” method that was usually sufficient when I extracted data from websites did not work on this specific website. Then I found Instant Data Scraper, an automated data extraction tool.
I work a lot with sports data, mostly found on websites, and this tool works so much better and saves a ton of time. Here’s how you can use it in four easy steps.
Step 1: Install
Install Instant Data Scrapper as a Chrome extension by clicking on “Add to Chrome” and the “Add Extension” button that will pop up immediately after.
Now let’s start extracting…
Step 2: Extracting your data
We are going to use the Series A salaries data for 2022/23 on Capology for this exercise, which is presented like this on the website:
The goal now is to extract the data from the website and convert it into a spreadsheet so it is in a readable format that can be manipulated.
Once you’ve opened the page, use the Chrome extension which you’ll find by clicking on the puzzle icon on the top right-hand corner of your browser.
Once you’ve clicked on the extension, it will present the data in this format (below), and you can do quite a few things with it before downloading.
Use the cross on the top right-hand corner of each column to remove any column you don’t want. If you mistakenly delete a column that you need, you can click “Reset All” to restore all the columns in the original format.
Step 3: Getting your data
Once you are satisfied with your data, take it into your spreadsheet by clicking on “Copy All” and then paste it. Or you download it as a CSV or XLSX.
Step 4: Using the data
Once you’ve got the data in a spreadsheet, you can use our spreadsheet formulas or spreadsheet functions guide to manipulate the data. Check out our Flourish and Figma guide to create custom charts using the data you’ve just extracted and manipulated.
Media Hack Collective offers data journalism training across the African continent and publishes data journalism on The Outlier, which includes a growing collection of charts and data-backed newsletters.
