If your users need to analyze data found on a Web site, they might be in for a bunch of tedious retyping. Under the right circumstances, however, Excel 97 can save them a lot of time by letting them open an HTML page in Excel directly from the Web.

The procedure is just a slight modification of the standard file-opening procedure:
1. Choose Open from the File menu.
2. In the File Name text box, type the URL of the Web file to open. Note: Be sure to include the prefix http://.
3. From the Files Of Type drop-down list, select HTML Documents (*.html, *.htm).
4. Click Open.

Excel opens HTML pages based on the HTML table structure of the page, so some Web design treatments may lead to some weird results in Excel. For pages that cleanly present data in a table format, however, this approach can be a real time-saver.