Downloading vBulletin or any web page

[randy street]

There were a couple people asking how to download an entire vBulletin thread.

You can use some VBA code to loop through each page and download into Excel.

I found this on the web and pasted it in an excel module. I had it loop through all Martys "Birth of a Shop" thread on SMC and download into an excel page. Took about 3 minutes to get his entire thread.


Sub Read_URL_Test()

With ActiveSheet.QueryTables.Add(Connection:="URL;http://www.sawmillcreek.org/printthread.php?t=36894&pp=40", _
Destination:=Range("a1")) 'write web-page to sheet

.BackgroundQuery = True
.TablesOnlyFromHTML = True
.Refresh BackgroundQuery:=False
.SaveData = True
End With

End Sub

I'm sure with all the computer knowledge most people on here have, you can make this do some interesting things.

Regards

Randy

[Lee DeRaud]

Whoa!! I knew you export Excel to HTML...didn't realize it worked the other way too.

People can badmouth Microsoft all they want, but VBA gives them great positive karma, IMHO. There are just too many cool things you can do with it.

[Marty Walsh]

Randy,

Thanks for coming up with this, and for sending me the end result. Now if only there was a way to actually download the pictures into the Excel file, instead of links into SMC...

- Marty -

[randy street]

They never restored your pictures.

There are a couple of other ways to get a web page into Excel or Word. Go to File-Open. Where the file name box is just paste in the web page address and it will open up in software. Word does a better job of keeping the formating.

The only way I know to get the images is to actually save the web page to your hard drive so it brings all the images with it.

A couple things I did find out downloading the vBulletin data. You can add some text to the end of the web page address and get more post on a page.

Here is the address to Marty's 1st page

http://familywoodworking.org/forums/...read.php?t=141

By adding &pp=200 to the end, you get the first 200 post all on one page.

http://familywoodworking.org/forums/...p?t=141&pp=200

So you can view or download a thread with upto 200 post on one page. Martys thread now becomes only 4 pages instead of 66.

This must be a setup in vBulletin because at SMC you can only get 40 post.


Regards

Randy