Exporting StackOverflow User Blogs to Excel

It’s more simple than what you think

Do you find yourself with the need to automatically convert URLs that you have imported in your cells to hyperlinks? If you search on Google there are many solutions but the top ones add complexity using macros or VBA solutions.

I needed to do it quickly in the context of retrieving information from the StackOverflow API. I was searching for all sites from users in a specific country to keep track of their blogs. So I added

SELECT
   Id,
   DisplayName,
   Reputation,
   WebsiteUrl
FROM
   Users
WHERE
   Location like '%Buenos Aires%' or Location like '%Argentina%'
ORDER BY
   Reputation DESC

on http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/110548/  and exported it to CSV but when they were imported to Microsoft Excel I needed to convert the URLs manually. The results are ordered by StackOverflow ranking.

I found this solution, you can just use the Microsoft Excel hyperlink function. Say you have URLs as plain text in the cell D2, then on column E2 add something like =hyperlink(D2) and this will do the trick. You can now click on all the cells!

Please don’t tell recruiters about this. Hopefully they don’t develop web mashups.

See Also

  1. Integrating Google Analytics into your Company Loop with a Microsoft Excel Add-on
  2. Automated Discovery of Blog Feeds and Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Accounts Connected to Business Website

Resources

  1. Most influential github users by location
  2. Implement OData API for StackOverflow
  3. Creative Commons Stack Overflow Data Dump