How to download an HTML table in CSV format in Firefox
You can find information on just about anything online. There are great write up and detailed essays available on almost every topic. There is also a ton of data, raw and otherwise available that you can access for free. If you find a useful data table online, and it’s an HTML table, you can copy it with a simple keyboard shortcut however, it’s not always pretty or easy. If you have a particularly long, or complicated table that you need to copy, you can do it in Firefox with an add-on.
Download table as CSV lets you download an HTML table in CSV format. You can then open the CSV file in Excel and create graphs from the table, or analyze it.
HTML table in CSV
Download the Download table as CSV add-on. Visit a website that has a table on it. If you’re looking to test the add-on out, you can always go to Wikipedia and look up something like world population statistics.
Find a table, and right-click it. You will see a ‘Download table as CSV’ option in the context menu. Select it, and then select if you want to open the file in your default spreadsheet app, or save it to your local disk.
The data is formatted perfectly in that the values aren’t mixed up. The rows and columns look exactly the way they did on the webpage. You can convert the file from CSV to any other format of your choice. If you use Microsoft Excel, you can convert the file to XLSX after opening it in the app.
If you need to convert a table you made in Excel or Google Spreadsheets to HTML, and you don’t have a WYSIWYG editor that can do that, give Tableizer a try. It’s a pretty basic app that lets you copy and paste a table, and gives you the HTML code for it. You can paste that code into your website and it will render it perfectly. You can create the table yourself if you want but making tables in HTML without a proper editor is the most tedious thing you will ever do.
The Download table as CSV add-on works great most times but at times, the option doesn’t appear in the context menu. If that happens, you should refresh the page, or close the browser and open it again. Make sure that you’re clicking inside the table and not outside it. You should also check if it is indeed an HTML table and not an image of it.
