how do you get excel to look up an isbn number and return title and author?

how do you get excel to look up an isbn number and return title and author?
we use barcode scanners to list our books for sale on amazon but when we are at a book fair we want to be able to scan books into excel and have it return the book title, author and other book information, but can’t work out how to do it!

it seams that practically everyone at the book fairs has this facility but i’ve not been able to find anyone willing to tell us how it works.

can anyone help?

obviously we’ve done lots of web searches for macros and that kind of thing but of course as soon as you put in isbn you get loads of results about excel books and how to write macros from pages where a book is listed with its isbn number.

looking forward to getting to the bottom of this if anyone has the solution

best regards

roger
a couple of useful responses so far, thanks, but not the answer i’m looking for. We have a couple of barcode scanners already and you just fire them at any book and they read the isbn and inseert it into whatvere is your active window, works great with isbndb.org and amazon etc and returns the book details on screen, but we dont have the list of all the books in the world to query in excel so somehow we need to make excel lookup the isbn on the internet and return the book data back into our spreadsheet automatically

Best answer:

VLOOKUP should work. Have you tried this? But Microsoft Access may be better for what you are doing.

Tags: author, Excel, isbn, look, number, return, title

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