How can I download the data from https://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-public-colleges/index.php ?
1 Answer
There are unlimited ways for you to download this data in a number of formats; making some choices around which format(s) is desired is your first step, as that will limit your download options and help narrow down scope.
The easiest way to download this data is to save the website as HTML from your browser. In Firefox on OS X, if you click on the "File" option in the nav bar, the dropdown has the option to "Save Page As", and there are two options for saving as HTML. While being the easiest, this is probably the least desirable, because while you do have your data, you still have to clean it up before you can access it.
The second easiest way to download this data is to open your browser's dev tools, inspect the data for its parent element (in this case table), and copy the HTML; in Firefox on OS X, I right click over the data, then look at the markup for it in the inspector, find its parent element, right click on that, select "Copy", then "Outer HTML", which gives you an actionable dataset. Though actionable is a bit generous, because if you want to do anything with it besides show an HTML table, you will have to get the data out of the markup and into another format.
The third easiest way to download this data is to use Google Sheet's importHTML like so:
=IMPORTHTML("https://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-public-colleges/index.php", "table", 1)
which will give you an actionable dataset. Once imported, you can download in Sheets from the "File" option in the nav bar; go to "Download as" and you'll be presented with multiple tabular format options. In my completely biased opinion, CSV is almost always ideal here.
This Google Sheet is doing this for you, pulling in a different dataset in each tab. You may want to double check they are all covered there; its not 100% clear to me how many there are; I'm confused by their URL naming conventions.
They are infinite more solutions using a plethora of technologies that can do this, outputting in more formats listed here. These three are just the easiest, minimal tooling-technologies used, and therefore cover the greatest percentage of users, in my opinion.
