Is it just me or is the recent surge of DataNitro scripts just proof of concepts? I don't really want to do get Facebook Likes in Excel or play Blackjack. They added a Python handler in Excel to do this, it isn't native.

My question is, why is this interesting?

My guess is advertising. HN is their exact demographic / target users, and if you check the front page of "classic" HN where only old accounts can vote: http://news.ycombinator.org/classic It's gone. Someone gamed this to the front page

What's the threshold for an "old account"?

Joined in the first year of HN

For me, it's still "proof of concept" right now. It's interesting because Python is much easier to use than VBA. Where I work, we use a lot of Excel and data from various sources. The ability to leverage Python code can be a big deal for me.

It's been possible to script Excel (and the rest of Office) using Python for probably 15 years now. I'm pretty sure the COM package is included with all the Win32 Python builds, but if not it's just a package install.

It's a bit disappointing that so many people don't learn about the tools they're using.

I can't speak to the wider surge of DataNitro scripts, but this example is certainly useful to a lot of people.

I regularly have to check the social signals for a lot of URLs, and then wrangle the data in Excel. Now I can do it faster and more efficiently. :)

Also I wasn't aware of DataNitro until now, so I actually found this interesting too. I'll be thinking what I can come up with!

Competitor analysis with simple Excel tools. Hm.. I like that ! I wonder if you could build a whole Excel application for social media tracking. There are companies out there that are very successful in this space. Perhaps with your superior technology you could outdo them!

Here are some tools you might like! :)

A blog post I wrote on getting Facebook Likes/Shares, Tweets and Google +1s in Google Docs:

http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/3-quick-ways-to-c...

An awesome set of SEO tools for Excel:

http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/

A great new tool for getting competitor backlink data in Excel:

https://seogadget.co.uk/mozscape-api-extension-for-excel/

The script is not getting 'likes,' it's pulling the number of 'shares' for a particular URL.

If you want to get to a brand's like-count, you'll need to feed the Graph API with either the Facebook Username of the account (e.g. "nike", not "http://www.nike.com "), or with the Facebook ID# of the brand (e.g. "15087023444").

This can be misleading though. This script does get the count you will see on a Facebook 'Like' button which is actually the sum of the 'like','share', and 'comment' counts.

For example, the script gets a count of 1,257,333 for www.apple.com:

https://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://www.apple.com

Which from here we can see is the sum of the 3 values:

http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats...

And by entering www.apple.com as the URL here we can confirm is exactly the figure the Like button shows:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

So whilst maybe not 100% accurate in some regards, it is certainly what many people would refer to as the 'like' count (and they'd be confused if you gave a lower number which isn't what the like button on the page showed). This tool is aimed more at URLs than brands.

Ah. Right! Thanks. I'll have to change this today then.

Is there a version of DataNitro for Office for Mac?

Nope. I'll keep dreaming too. ;)

Some poor schmuck is wrangling excel spreadsheets with facebook integration for clueless twits, somewhere.

Glad it's not me.

Python is awesome.