InstaPaper — Download Your Content As Hyperlinked Links Into MS Excel

InstaPaper is great cloud service for accumulating your content — links, videos, articles, etc. — to “read later” on any of your devices.
However, if you use it for awhile, you accumulate a LOT of links that you may want to download and keep (I’ve seen this a few times…).
Here’s how you do it.
1 — Download the content links
- Open up the Instapaper web browser link — https://www.instapaper.com
- Click on your username and select Settings


- Scroll down and select “Download HTML File”. This selection creates a file and downloads a hyperlinked list of contents.

2 — Create Excel file and populate with downloaded links
- A file named “Instapaper-export.html” will download. Open this file in your web browser. The “Unread” category is what you want to paste into Excel (this assumes you have not moved content into folders, etc.)

- Copy and paste the data into Excel (up to the Archive point)

- Paste the copied data into Excel — it will appear as follows, hyperlinked to the website where it is located.

3 — Finish up and Potential Next Steps
- At this point, clean up the data (Header, assign categories if desired, etc.) and you have the start of a permanent searchable / linked reference.
- Lastly, return to the InstaPaper website and “Archive” all content (unless you want to keep as Unread in Instapaper — note, this will cause problems the next time you want to download any updated content and add it to your Excel file).


There you go — a simple solution to keeping your Instapaper content in a linked resource. This was demonstrated with Microsoft Excel, but would work the same in way in Google Sheets. If you use Google Sheets, you have the added benefit of the content being available in the Google cloud!
Good luck!
About Don

Don Tomoff is a “recovering CPA”, who is passionate about helping professionals and organizations keep up and adapt to the changing business world that we operate in.
One lesson learned over the years is that all of us, regardless of organization type or size, struggle with similar issues — primarily information management and presentation, and effective use of our time. Let’s change that…one person at a time!
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