How to Get Weather Data into Excel

Pulling weather data into Excel can instantly add a powerful layer of context to your business analysis. By combining weather patterns with your own sales, marketing, or operational data, you can uncover hidden trends that guide smarter decisions. This article will show you three practical methods to get historical and forecast weather data directly into your spreadsheets.

Why Put Weather Data in Excel in the First Place?

Before diving into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." Connecting weather conditions to your business metrics isn't just a nifty trick, it's a way to find real-world correlations that impact your bottom line. Once you have weather data next to your key performance indicators (KPIs), you can start answering valuable questions.

• For Retailers and E-commerce Stores: Do hotter days lead to more sales of ice cream, shorts, or air conditioners? Do rainy weekends drive more online shopping traffic? By knowing this, you can adjust inventory, ad copy, and promotional timing.
• For Restaurants and Hospitality: Does foot traffic to your patio drop when the temperature goes above 90°F? Do you get more delivery orders during a snowstorm? This information helps with staff scheduling, inventory planning, and targeted marketing pushes ("Rainy Day Special!").
• For Event Planners: How will a 10-day forecast impact attendance for an outdoor concert or market? Do ticket sales slow down when rain is predicted? You can better plan for logistics, promotion, and contingency plans.
• For Marketers: Do Facebook Ads for indoor activities perform better on cold, dreary days? Can you target ads for rain gear to users in cities expecting a storm? Weather-based ad targeting can significantly improve campaign relevance and ROI.
• For Construction and Agriculture: When are the ideal temperature and precipitation windows for pouring concrete or planting crops? Tracking historical weather patterns and upcoming forecasts is crucial for project management.

By getting this data into a familiar environment like Excel, you can start building simple models, visualizing correlations, and making more informed, data-driven decisions.

Method 1: The Quick and Easy Web Query

The simplest way to pull weather data into Excel is by using the built-in "From Web" feature, which is part of Power Query. This method works by scraping data directly from a public webpage that displays weather information in a structured table. It’s perfect for one-off analyses or simple tracking.

Step-by-Step Guide:

1. Find a Weather Data Source with a Table: Your first step is to find a website that shows historical or forecast data in an HTML table. Simple weather widgets or graphics won't work. Search for things like "historical weather [Your City] monthly" or "10-day forecast table." Many almanac or detailed weather sites have this.
2. Copy the URL: Once you've found a good page with a table of data, copy the full URL from your browser's address bar.
3. Open Excel's "From Web" Tool: In Excel, go to the Data tab. In the "Get & Transform Data" section, click on From Web. (Note: Depending on your Excel version, this might be under Data > Get Data > From Other Sources > From Web.)
4. Paste the URL: A dialog box will appear. Paste the URL you copied into the field and click OK.
5. Select Your Data Table: Excel will analyze the page and show you a "Navigator" window. This window lists all the tables it found on the webpage. Click on each one until you see your weather data previewed on the right. Once you find the correct one, select it.
6. Load the Data: Click the Load button at the bottom. Excel will work for a moment and then import the data into a new worksheet as a formatted Excel table. It’s that easy!

Refreshing Your Data

The best part about this method is that the query is live. If you're pulling forecast data, you don't have to repeat the process every day. Just go to the Data tab and click Refresh All. Excel will automatically go back to the source URL and pull in the latest information. Voila!

• Pros: Extremely easy to set up, requires no coding, and data can be refreshed with one click.
• Cons: Highly dependent on the source website's structure. If the website owner redesigns their page and changes the table layout, your query will break.

Method 2: Using a Dedicated Weather API (The Robust Solution)

For a more reliable, customizable, and automated solution, connecting to a weather Application Programming Interface (API) is the way to go. An API is essentially a standardized way for computer programs to talk to each other. Instead of scraping a webpage meant for humans, you're asking a server for the raw data directly. This method is much more durable than the web query approach.

While "API" might sound intimidating, Excel's Power Query makes it surprisingly straightforward. No coding required!

Step 1: Get an API Key

First, you need to sign up for a weather API service. Many providers offer generous free tiers perfect for spreadsheet analysis. Here are a couple of popular options:

• OpenWeatherMap: Very popular and offers a great free plan that includes current weather, forecasts, and even some historical data.
• Visual Crossing: Offers a weather API and is also known for its ease of use in business applications.

Go to one of these sites, sign up for a free plan, and look for your API Key in your account dashboard. An API key is just a long string of letters and numbers that identify you to the service. Keep it safe and don't share it publicly.

Step 2: Build Your API Request URL

Next, you'll need a URL that tells the API what data you want. Each API has its own documentation explaining how to structure this, but they usually follow a simple pattern. For example, to get the current weather in London using OpenWeatherMap, the URL would look like this:

https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=London&appid=YOUR_API_KEY

Breakdown:

• https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather: This is the base endpoint for the data.
• ?: Separates the endpoint from the parameters.
• q=London: This is the location parameter. You can change this to any city.
• &: Separates different parameters.
• appid=YOUR_API_KEY: This tells the service who is asking. Replace YOUR_API_KEY with the key you got in step one.

Step 3: Connect Excel to the API with Power Query

This process is exactly the same as the web query method, but the data you get back is cleaner and more structured.

1. In Excel, go to Data > From Web.
2. Paste your complete API request URL and click OK.
3. Instead of seeing table previews, Power Query will likely detect the format as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), which is a standard data format for APIs. It will automatically open the Power Query Editor.
4. You'll see a record of the data. Find the tool at the top that says "To Table" and click it. Hit OK in the next dialogue box.
5. Now you'll have a table with one column. Look for a button with two arrows pointing in opposite directions in the column header. Click this button to Expand the data. Untick "Use original column name as prefix" and click OK.
6. Boom! The editor will now display all the individual weather data points (temperature, humidity, feels like, wind speed, etc.) in separate columns. You can now clean up the data - remove columns you don't need, rename others, and check data types - all within the editor.
7. When you're happy with the format, click Close & Load in the top-left corner.

The structured data will now be in your Excel sheet, ready for analysis and connected to a reliable source. Just like the other method, you can use Data > Refresh All to pull fresh data anytime.

• Pros: Very reliable and stable, highly customizable, provides clean, machine-readable data.
• Cons: Involves a slightly more complex initial setup.

Method 3: Using an Excel Add-in

If you prefer a solution integrated directly into the Excel user interface, several third-party add-ins are available that are specifically designed to import weather data.

To find one, you can go to the Insert tab in Excel and click Get Add-ins. This will open the Office Add-in store. Search for "weather" and you’ll see some options. A commonly used one is the Visual Crossing Weather Add-in.

The workflow for most add-ins is similar:

1. Once installed, the add-in will typically create a new pane or ribbon inside Excel.
2. You'll use a simple form to enter locations, select a date range (historical or forecast), and choose which weather metrics you want (temperature, precipitation, wind speed, etc.).
3. With a click of a button, the add-in will fetch the data and insert it directly into your active worksheet.

• Pros: Very user-friendly with no URLs or APIs to manage, well-integrated into the Excel environment.
• Cons: Often subscription-based, though many have limited free versions. You are reliant on a third-party developer for support and updates.

Tips for Analyzing Your Weather Data

Once the data is in your spreadsheet, here are a few quick tips to make it useful:

• Convert Units: Many APIs provide temperature in Kelvin or Celsius. Create a new column with a simple formula to convert it to your preferred unit. For example, to convert Celsius in cell A2 to Fahrenheit: (A2*9/5)+32
• Use XLOOKUP to Merge Data: The end goal is to analyze weather against your business data. Organize your data sets (e.g., daily sales and daily weather) with a common date column. Then, use a function like XLOOKUP (or the classic VLOOKUP) to pull the temperature or precipitation for a given day into your sales report.
• Visualize It: Create a simple chart to see if any patterns jump out immediately. For example, you could create a combo chart with daily sales as a bar chart and daily high temperature as a line chart on a secondary axis. Visualizing the data makes correlations far easier to spot.

Final Thoughts

Importing weather data into Excel can transform your standard business reports into powerful analytical tools, allowing you to connect real-world conditions to performance. Whether you use the simple web query, a versatile API connection, or a dedicated add-in, getting this external data into your spreadsheet is more accessible than ever.

While Excel is fantastic for this kind of ad-hoc analysis, managing multiple refreshing data connections and combining them with data from other platforms like your Shopify store, Google Analytics, social media ads, and CRM can become a time-intensive process. For this, we built Graphed to simplify the entire reporting workflow. It allows you to connect all your data sources and then use simple, natural language to ask questions and instantly build the dashboards you need. Instead of wrestling with a dozen spreadsheets, you can just ask, "Show me a chart comparing our daily web traffic vs. precipitation for New York last month," and get a live, automated dashboard in seconds.