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Question #1 -- We are trying the get the data currently in table form out of this online database and into a spreadsheet. The end game is a postal mailing list/sales contact list. So we're looking for first, last, title, company, addresses1, addresses2, city, state, zip/prov, country, phone, fax, email. Any thoughts? https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cber/CFAppsPub/tiss/Index.cfm.

Question #2 -- Below is a link to a MAUDE report. It’s a terrible incident involving a patient death. Without sounding like I have a stone cold heart, I was more interested in other aspects of the report. In the report there’s a data field called Manufacturer Contact. Can I build a list of MAUDE Manufacturer Contact data quickly and easily? Same rational and end product as above: first, last, title, company, addresses1, addresses2, city, state, zip/prov, country, phone, fax, email. Any thoughts? http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/Cfdocs/cfmaude/detail.cfm?mdrfoi__id=3164029

Jeff Grizzel
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I would suggest filing a FOIA request with FDA for the complete dataset.

Barring that, web scraping is a common strategy for extracting data from web sites. It might be a stretch for a "neophyte," but it's something you'll find a ton of guidance on from a Google search. (Perhaps too much, but I think getting into the details of scraping are out-of-scope for this site, and definitely for this question.)

Note that a simple Google search for how to scrape web pages includes a number of hits which talk about how to do it without writing your own code.

Joe Germuska
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to part two, you can scrape the document using google spreadsheets really easily, inserting =ImportHTML("http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/Cfdocs/cfmaude/detail.cfm?mdrfoi__id=3164029", "table", 12) into the first cell, where "12" denotes the table's number in the document. this isn't perfect, i already see two answers defined as table, so you'll want to probably hack around with it to see desired results.
also, there are a million better ways to do this, but figured this would be easiest for you.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IskCmIL16ur2urJdrAo7c_w_2AOIwsx_a1Kajvs1p5M/edit#gid=0

albert
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In answer to question #1, it looks like Excel Power Query can be used to bring the openFDA data into a table.

This video illustrates how to bring OpenFDA data into an Excel table. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-FhPq_0N0M

T Lasky
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