For a quick and dirty approach you can use .iqy query files. It's a really basic format, just a text file with a URL to open and options defined by embedding a

For a quick and dirty approach you can use .iqy query files. It's a really basic format, just a text file with a URL to open and options defined by embedding arrays in the params string. e.g. POST Example.com/get_data?first_param=["parameter name","parameter description"] And then a few variables describing the format of the data to return - it'll parse an HTML table and csv's/tab separated values but that's about it, but it's better than the copy paste loop hell. You can then add the query file as an external data source and pass parameters to queries to a web interface through excel - cell values or user inputs. It's cross platform back to at least osx office 2003. They're a little clunky, but pretty painless to setup and the only mac compatible system I've found. Excel<->Web data integration is something I've been weirdly interested in for awhile - if anyone has questions feel free to email me (its in hn profile) Shameless plug: I wrote excel-data, a ruby gem that generates iqy files for excel, formats ruby hashes in a format it can interpret, and parses excels bizarre date format. It's pretty basic and my first OSS project, but gives you an idea of the format.