Excel 365 has a way to grab information about movies dropped directly into worksheets. Get info about films, cast, director, rating, budget, box office returns and a lot more with the Linked Data Types.
Our ebook Real Time Excel goes into detail about Linked Data Types as well as more info for Stocks, Currency Exchange Rates and Stock Indexes.
Linked Data Types (LDT) aren’t perfect, as we’ll see the information supplied is sometimes incomplete, wrong or just plain ridiculous.
Adding Movie data to Excel
If you’re new to Linked Data Types. Type the name of a movie into an Excel cell, probably in Column A of a blank worksheet. Then start from the Data tab, Data Types, pull-down the list and choose Movies.
A little icon will appear if Excel has found information about that movie.
Movie info fields
Each Linked Data Type has it’s own set of fields (or bits of information) that you can choose from.
- Cast and roles
- Company
- Director
- Genre
- Image – usually a ‘poster’ image.
- International box office total receipts
- US box office total receipts
- Worldwide box office total receipts
- Language
- Producer
- Production Budget
- Rating
- Rating Advisory
- Release Date
- Runtime – minutes
- Title
- Wikipedia Summary Text
- Wolfram Data Type
- Writer
Data Type Card
Excel’s Data Type Card is a single view of all the movie information that’s been downloaded to the worksheet.
Titles
The data has an American and English language bias but includes many non-English films too. Interestingly, you can enter the original film titles (e.g. Der Untergang, Die Fälscher) and they can be converted to their English titles (Downfall and The Counterfeiters).
It doesn’t always work, we tried to get data for “Shichinin no Samurai” and Excel’s LDT could not recognize it. But pasting the same name in Japanese characters “七人の侍” gave us data for the famous Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai.
Box Office values
The box office values should be taken with a large, if not a whole pillar, of salt.
The amounts have no time period so it’s unknown if they are for the first release only, first year after release or some other time. No currency is given, we’re assuming US dollars but the Data Card doesn’t say (usually the Data Card has the currency or other measurement standard).
There are three values given, International, Worldwide and US. The ‘International’ amount seems to be subtracting the Worldwide and US values, regardless of how preposterous they might be.
For example, Citizen Kane’s US returns is supposed to be exactly a million dollars with overseas box office a mere $6k. Seven Samurai (one of the most famous Japanese films of all time) is supposed to have earned just $8,036 outside the US including Japan!
Extra linked data types in Excel 365
Be careful with Excel 365’s Linked Data Types
Don’t trust Excel’s Linked Data Types, always verify
Excel 365 now has Nested Linked Data Types
