Excel 2003 - Importing External Data from Google Doc (Drive) Spreadsheet

I am working on data that comes from a Google Drive (used to be Google Doc) spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is populated by people filling in a Google form which then posts to it.

My Excel spreadsheet then imports the external data from the Google Doc.

It all works fine apart from the fact that Excel 2003 doesn’t recognise a table on the Google Drive page so all it can do is download the whole page. This takes a bit longer I guess and I end up with an Excel sheet that has on it all sorts of extraneous stuff on it like the words:

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I can get around this by getting the sheet to go to cell B131 (there’s 130 rows of blank or non-relevant stuff) and ignore everything prior.

This all works fine but doesn’t seem future proof and I guess on a different machine it will not be right.

Any thoughts on either

a) getting Excel 2003 to go to the table within the Google Spreadsheet so as not to download the erroneous stuff
b) getting Excel to always find the start of the data regardless of where on the sheet it loads.
c) other ways of doing it!

I’d be interested in other people’s thoughts please.

Regards

Ian

I could help you with b if there is a distinct feature to look for

Originally Posted by rcm

I could help you with b if there is a distinct feature to look for

Thanks rcm. As it's my Google Doc spreadsheet I control the content so could for example put the phrase, "EXCELSTARTHERE" in the cell 1 above the data I need. Is that what you meant?

So the phrase would be inserted in column a, one could write a macro to locate it (find the row #) and delete all rows above it

Originally Posted by rcm

So the phrase would be inserted in column a, one could write a macro to locate it (find the row #) and delete all rows above it

Yes that makes sense, thank you. I'll give it a go.

Originally Posted by rcm

So the phrase would be inserted in column a, one could write a macro to locate it (find the row #) and delete all rows above it

I've tried it and can get the Macro to find the key phrase in the data - the only problem that I have is that I need to keep the data in the 2 rows above the key phrase so need to

delete all rows above a cell 2 rows above the key phrase

Any thoughts on how I might manage that please?

send me the macro