Originally posted on 03/14/2014:

Going to do my best at giving an Excel based tutorial for those interested.

I am an electrical engineering graduate with both my masters and bachelors in EE. Throughout my studies, I've taken a few different software based courses in java, C++, matlab, and VBA. Since I don't code much for my job, I've found the easiest to forget/remember/ and use is VBA. Visual Basic/VBA is the coding software inside of Microsoft Excel.

If you haven't ever done so, you will need to enable the "developer tab" in Excel. I have 2007 and to enable it: click the microsoft symbol at the very top left with excel open, and when a tab opens up, click Excel options. Another tab will open and under the "Popular" tab, click "Show Developer Tab" and then ok. If you have another version of Excel, do a quick research on google and someone will show you how to enable it.

I have not tried some of the other options listed such as Python etc so I cannot comment on those. I have been using VBA/Excel to do all of my web scraping for going on three years and have never been "crippled" by it; other than the fact you cannot easily pull data from ".php" or similar type websites.

My main focuses are both the NHL and NFL and I have been going through yearrrrrss of data for both and have parsed through quite of bit of ideas/trends/you name it. I've tried to debunk or find truth in current myths etc in sports to see if they made sense or didn't. For example, once I had a good database in the NHL, I wanted to see if teams on games in B2B days really suffered in their second game - I really didn't find much truth to this, and if there was, it was already calculated in the game line.

I have scraped data from NHL.com/ESPN/SBR as my main webpages.

Ask any questions you may have as I am an "expert" on VBA and don't proclaim to know it all, but have learned quite a bit over the years. I will try to keep the tutorial as detailed or as ordinary as need be for users of all types.