NOTE: It appears the information below is no longer relevant. You are welcome to read the article because it still contains a valuable approach that can be used in other scenarios. But the specific act of web querying FanDuel for salary information as shown below no longer seems to work.
Does this sound familiar?
You’re doing prep work for setting a daily lineup or even preparing for a season-long rotiserrie league. You’re trying to set up a spreadsheet to help you prepare, but you are sick and tired of having to copy information from the web and paste it into Excel.
There has to be a better way!
In this post I’ll show you an efficient way of grabbing player salaries directly from FanDuel’s website using Excel’s web query function. In fact, I’ll show you three different variations of Excel web queries:
- Simple web query
- Dynamic web query
- Table-specific web query
Before I begin, I need to be honest with you about something.
I Don’t Know Where We’re Going
This is the first post of what I hope will be a series documenting how to build a spreadsheet for DFS. But the thing is, I don’t know exactly where I’m headed on this journey. I can’t promise you a panacea to cure all your DFS aches and pains. I don’t have a master plan that will lead us to a perfect functioning spreadsheet that will fit everyone’s exact desires. But my plan is to just start moving the ball in the right direction.
I don’t have much DFS experience. I don’t know exactly what you want. If you are looking for DFS lineup advice, I can tell you I won’t be giving that. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career… OK, I’ll end my Liam Neeson joke.
I hope that by just starting to build something, starting to share techniques you can use on your own, and by seeking feedback, we will eventually end up with something special.
Some of the techniques I’ll show you may seem silly. Or pointless. Or way too involved.
But I have a purpose in mind. You might wonder why I pull data from Site Y when Site X has the same information in an easier to use format. Or you may want to incorporate additional data that I don’t want to pursue.
That is why I want to stress it is not the “WHAT” in the instructions that is the important part. It is the “HOW”. I’m going for that whole “teach a man to fish” proverb. So let’s start learning…
Not All Versions of Excel are Created Equal
I’ll be using Office 2013 installed on a Windows 7 machine. I believe the web querying experience will be similar for Office 2007 and Office 2010 (while using Windows). Unfortunately, I have had poor results with web querying in Excel for Mac, but it can be done.
What Is a Web Query?
A web query is an automated way to copy information from a table on a web page into Excel. It removes the need for you to manually copy and paste data from websites into Excel. On top of that, you can set the query up to run each time you open an Excel file or change a particular value, so you can escape the cycle of continuously needing to go to a web site, copy the data, and paste it into Excel each day you want to set lineups. It can refresh automatically!
As you’ll soon see, setting up a basic web query is fairly easy. But there are a couple of more advanced settings that should make your life a little bit easier.
Step-By-Step Instructions, Simple Web Query
For this example, let’s just go with a simple and straight-forward web query. Later in this post we will build on this.