Would you mind making a great browser even better? Well, I guess I know the answer... Especially if you're an avid keyword researcher and you've run into one of the few shortcomings that Firefox has, i.e. how it handles copying tables.
Basically, if you try to copy a table from Firefox into Excel (for example, results from Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or any other service), you will be greatly disappointed to discover that all rows and columns get pasted into... one cell in Excel. And I guess you do not feel like copying them one by one.
Well, extension to the rescue! Just download and install the really excellent TableTools extension and you will be able to do all sorts of nice tricks with your tables in Firefox. First of all, you can easily copy them as comma separated files which can be easily pasted into Excel. But this extension is so much more powerful. Let me quote directly from the description:
TableTools sorts, filters or copies any HTML table. Two filtering modes supported: select filtering (each column has one drop down menu allowing you to select a certain value); search filtering (each column has one search box allowing you to search for any value in the column using keyword(s) or javascript regular expressions, very powerful and flexible!).
The other extension that I find extremely useful in my keyword research (or any research in general) is ScrapBook. Basically, it just allows you to save any page locally in its original form, including css styles, javascript, etc. You can also search all saved pages - all from within Firefox. It's very helpful for example when you want to save results generated by the keyword bookmarklet - you will still be able to use the word map after saving results locally.
Please watch the embedded video to see both of these extensions in action.
How about a data import from Excel?
Marcin:
I'm glad you found the plug-ins useful.
You might like to know that you can directly import tables from websites into Excel spreadsheets in post-2000 versions of the program.
Go to the "Data" menu item. Select "Import External Data".
Then select "New Web Query". A sort of browser should pop up.
In the browser's address bar, enter the address of the page whose data you would like to import.
Highlight the table you want to import (Excel recognizes HTML tables and should help you out...you'll probably end up just clicking on a yellow arrow), and click the "Import" button.
Tell Excel where you want to put the imported data and hit the "Ok" button.
Voila.
There is no need to cut from your browser and paste into Excel --- Excel does all the work for you. Formatting is all there is left to do.
I really like the blog, btw. Keep up the good work. :-)
Rick, thanks for your
Rick,
thanks for your helpful comment. Yes, I know about this feature, but it's not that useful when I am doing keyword research. When I am in the middle of this process, I usually have like 10 - 20 tabs opened in Firefox, navigating between various tools, checking different niches and digging into subniches. Excel just can't beat the speed of Firefox here. And with TableTools, I don't even need to select the entire table to copy it. I just right-click somewhere in the middle of it and click copy in the context menu.
The other problem is that some tools always (Keyword Discovery) or sometimes (Wordtracker) display captchas, or require that you're logged-in to their paid services. I am not sure if Excel could handle this.
Still, the Excel feature could be useful in several cases, for example when you're monitoring some trends and want to immediately visualize them in a graph.
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