You can set Excel to automatically fetch the latest data on everything from how much campaign cash your congressional representative has on hand (and how many votes he or she has skipped) to where locals can plug in their electric cars.

The web is full of APIs, or application programming interfaces, that offer free data on a range of topics. But accessing them used to require learning at least the basics of a programming language like Python or Ruby. The Windows version of Excel 2016, however, includes a “Get & Transform” tool that can pull data out of an API and format it into rows and columns so you can use your arsenal of spreadsheet techniques to get busy looking for newsy patterns.

This 17-minute video will show you what you need to get started. Once you understand how to use the Get & Transform tool, you can start looking through all the interesting APIs at sites like data.gov and ProgrammableWeb.