Hello,
To start off I'm a complete novice with Excel and VBA, I have recently signed up for some courses as I believe it could be invaluable for where I work and myself.
I'm given a large data set every day with unique IDs that I need to cross reference against an 2 external websites, this takes up hours upon hours of my time not to mention the RSI that will soon happen I have no doubt!
I'm looking to create something that will take this unique IDs put them into the websites I need to check and pull back the required information, I just have no idea where I would start.
Any ideas/assistance would be great!
All the best,
L
Good Luck! I had a similar situation (many years ago), and I resorted to COBOL and a whole load of JCL. (Sorry to date myself, but that's the scope of the problem)!
At some point you will need to read, learn, mark and inwardly digest the inner workings of the HTTPRequest object. This is how you can programmatically interrogate a web-site, and retrieve data. The Excel/VBA part (apart from HTTPRequest) is fairly straightforward.
You need to lay out exactly what you are given (the large data set with Unique IDs), and detailed descriptions of what you do (slowly, of course, to avoid RSI), to accomplish your goal. What you've described is about 0.01% of what you actually do (and think). Add detail, and when you think you're done, add more detail.
If you have a programming background, you will probably be familiar with this process (StepWise Refinement). If not - you have all sorts of pleasures in store.
May I suggest that to begin with, you practice on this group. Expand upon your original post by answering the following questions.
1) Do you get just the Unique IDs? Or is there a whole load of other data associated with each ID.
2) Are the websites both at the same address or are they different addresses?
3) Where does this list of Unique IDs come from? What other data is associated with them? Is there human agency involved in putting the list together?
4) Is the UniqueID the same value that is used to retrieve data from the website(s)? If not, how do you retrieve data from the web-sites? If you are using fields from the dataset are those fields invariant? (If they are not invariant, then the supposedly unique ID (notice the lower case unique) could be changeable. Not what you want in a key field!)
Yes - it's a lot of questions, and a lot of work, but I believe that once you've answered these questions (which would be needed if we were to help you), you'll be well on the way to defining the scope of the solution you are looking for.
HTH,
Tony
