I’ve done Chrome web scraping in both Python and Excel using Selenium on a Windows 10 platform. I have also web scraped in Python using BeatifulSoup4. A new client had a requirement to find the distance between two zip codes. The client had created an Excel worksheet with a matrix of zip codes (vertical) and cities (horizontal). I found a web site that calculates the distance between two zip codes in a web page. The zip codes are part of the web page URL I converted the cities to city airport zip codes so I just needed to read rows and columns to create the URL and the scrape the results. Easy right?
Error 33
I implemented the VBA code and got a runtime error 33 when opening the Chrome browser. I checked other Excel scrapers that I had written and they all failed. So something was wrong with my Excel environment. An Internet search indicated that the version of Chrome and the chromedriver were not the same. I remembered that I had created a directory for Selenium webdrivers and added it to the system path. I updated the driver to match the Chrome version and I still got the same runtime error. I then tried one of my Python scrapers and they worked! So my problem was with Excel. I continued my search and couldn’t find a resolution until….
Excel Selenium Environment
To setup the Excel environment you need to add SeleniumBasic library, which I already had and the version hadn’t changed since 2016. To add the library to your VBA you need to select the Selenium Type Libary (editor Tools > References…). As I re-read the installation instructions I found that the driver needs to be placed in the same directory as the SeleniumBasic library, which for me was not the webdriver directory I had already updated. That was the difference. Excel did not use the system path for the webdriver.
Once I updated the chromdriver in the SeleniumBasic directory very thing started working again. Watch out for Chrome updates. For my environment I need to update the driver in two locations – the system path directory (Python) and the SeleniumBasic directory (Excel). A good description on setting up Excel to work with Selenium can be found at myOnlineTrainingHub.