complicated XML/API/Google docs questions

Okay, good luck with this, here we go.

I want to set up a spreadsheet in google docs (could do it in excel as well). Column A will be a TWITTER USER NAME. Column B and Column C will be variable data that is fetched from twitter regarding the twitter user in column A.

Here's the good news. i have enough of a working understanding of the twitter API that I know how to call a URL to querry a user name and get the information I need for Column B and Column C.

The information from the URL/API call is in XML format. Here's what I need to know how to do:

write a formula in Column B that says: query this URL and accept the XML return, extract THIS SPECIFIC FIELD from the XML doc that comes back and populate this cell with the data.

and then the same thing for column C.

I know this is actually possible, but I am struggling with figuring out how to retrieve data from a url from within excel and then how to parse a single variable in the xml results into a cell.

sorry, but I got nothing on that.

You're better off learning some scripting language and having it output a CSV file. I doubt excel has good support (if any) for making HTTP requests and parsing XML.

Excel has a function that queries a URL and accepts XML in return (i got that far last night in my tinkering). But I have to manually input the URLS rather than being able to pull the URLS from a different cell on the spread sheet. Working on it.