I have found what has to be the coolest Firefox plugins ever. I often spend hours scouring the web for bits of information that I need to bring into other documents. Many times, I’ll want to bring in a web table to Excel. This is often met with frustration and a lot of manual tweaking. Well, no more. Thanks to OutWit Technologies. They have developed a cool plug-in that extracts various bits of data from websites including images, text, and tables.
In the two figures above you can see an example of the extraction engine at work. I’ve loaded a page from Wikipedia that includes a table. I run the extraction on the page and the table is automatically pulled out. I can then copy and paste this easily into Excel. What’s really cool about this software is if you’re a regular expression geek, you can tune the extraction so it pulls the right data.
If you ever needed to pull data out of web pages, get this Firefox add-in today.
