I'm not going to lie, I have no programming experience whatsoever. I'm new to these forums and I'm a pretty active member at OCForums, so I know how it feels to have new members just coming to post their question and not offer anything back to the community. So although, I can't really offer anything in terms of programming if anyone needs any modding done or wants to get into overclocking then feel free to stop by ocforums and I'll be glad to help where I have a bit of expertise. After doing a lot of reading you guys seem to know what you're doing so I'd be eternally grateful if someone could help me with the following. I'm looking for a volunteer, but if this can be done, then we might be able to work something else out. At the very least, I'd love to know if automating this process is even possible. (Please let me know if you have any other questions regarding the assignment or if it's not clearly worded). Thanks in advance and I appreciate any and all help.
Start your engines.
Copied from OCForums:
Okay so I landed this great internship at a finance firm in NYC after my first year of college right? Right, well that's what I thought too until I started working. Since they couldn't find anything better for me to do, they decided to make me copy and paste stuff from a website into an excel document over and over... and over... and over... 36,000 times. At my current rate of productivity I can do 3/min if working like a mad man alt-tabbing etc., but I generally get about 500 companies done a day. I don't want to do this for the rest of eternity so I was wondering if there was anyway to automate the process, or at least some aspect of it.
The assignment is as follows:
From the following website:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/ind_index.html
I have to click each sector, go to the company index (on the left sidebar)
For Agriculture it will lead you here:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/112_cl_all.html
I then have to click each company and copy the:
1)name
2)description
3)address
4)financial highlights (if there)
5)key people
and then paste each into an organized spreadsheet on MS Excel.
There are over 36,000 and this is going to take me over 2 months to complete unless I can figure out some way to speed up the process. I would be eternally grateful if you could help me automate at least part of the process (particularly the copying/pasting part). Please let me know if anything can be done.
I don't mind downloading software and running something at home/buying software (as long as it's not too costly) if I can get this done already. I lack any and all programming skills, but it seems that it would be exceedingly difficult to automate the entire process, thus if I could at least automate the copy/paste part, then I could simply run the script/program whatever, then manually click the sector and run the script to speed up the process.
I would be eternally grateful if someone could figure out a way to speed up this terrible monotonous process. Thanks.
EDIT: I wasn't sure which section this would belong, because I don't know what language etc would be needed to do this, so if someone could move this to the appropriate forum or at least tell me where it belongs then I'd also appreciate that. Thanks.