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Sorry for the FAQ, but I really don't know where to find a full spreadsheet for element properties. I mean a table that has one row for each element, and the columns are its properties, such as name, atomic number, density, melting point, etc. I know that there are many sites or references for that, but I need it in tabular format, because I want to analyze data, make charts, etc.

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Something like this? – Aditya Sriram Dec 19 '12 at 9:39
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Or if someone knows programming, they can web-scrape source code of this website.(Don't know if it is legal) – Aditya Sriram Dec 19 '12 at 11:19
Yes, @AdityaSriram, That's exactly what I wanted – Mostafa Farzán Dec 19 '12 at 12:57

2 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

Well, here's a CSV file that I parsed out of the JSON data provided by Paul Nathan's website, which in turn was produced from gPeriodic data in response to this question. gPeriodic is FOSS, so I can only assume that the element data contained within is good to share, though I have no idea of its provenance.

The parser uses the python json module to read the data, which I then wrote into comma separated values, which should be readable by any halfway competent spreadsheet program.

Here it is: Pastebin Link

save it as elementdata.csv and you're good to go.

Some gotchas:

  • This reproduces the gPeriodic data, warts and all. I make no guarantees regarding its correctness, recency, etc. I just munged the data.
  • Some of the data is augmented with tildes, notes about temperature/polymorph/state etc. I've left these as they are but you may need to trim them if you want to plot them as numeric values.
  • Argon had an atomic radius of '2-', whatever that means. I cut it.
  • Excel is joke software and habitually interprets numbers wrapped in parentheses as negatives, because apparently some accountants decided that surrounding numbers in parens is a more sensible option than using a minus sign. Needless to say, this is wrong. I've addressed the problem by wrapping the affected numbers in angle brackets.
  • There are no ionic radii in the source data. At all. Not my fault.
  • The columns inherit the units of the source data. I've left the units out on purpose because I wanted each column to have no spaces in the name for ease of processing in R or whatever. Furthermore, the units in the source file have some inconvenient characters from an encoding perspective.

Tried plotting Z versus covalent radius in R from this data - looks alright:

enter image description here

Some of the data points are missing, some are not read by R because they are wrapped in <> - pre-process to your heart's content.

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Thanks, man but @AdityaSriram got me the excel file that I had described. Another time, thank you. – Mostafa Farzán Dec 19 '12 at 13:00
@MostafaFarzán - No offence intended to Aditya, but the data that I link to contains considerable additional information that may be quite interesting to plot. Moreover, as a .csv, it can be opened in excel as well as literally hundreds of other programs on all platforms, making it considerably more portable than an .xls, for which interoperability has always been a low priority for Microsoft. – Richard Terrett Dec 19 '12 at 14:08
Sorry, I didn't know that excel can open these files. The file was cool, but like that xls file, needs some works before charting. – Mostafa Farzán Dec 19 '12 at 15:24
"No offence intended to Aditya" -> None taken. – Aditya Sriram Dec 22 '12 at 12:13
up vote 3 down vote

Fine, here's my data taken from the reference mentioned in my above comment. I cannot vouch for it's accuracy.
This is in the .csv file format for its wide use as enlightened by Richard Terrett. You can combine certain ranges from this csv/spreadsheet to the one prepared by Richard, because it contains certain properties not contained in Richard's source.
Also there are certain properties in Richard's file which are absent/improper in mine so this file is best used in conjunction with Richard's file.

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Not bad! I assume this was obtained via scraping the ChemReference site? – Richard Terrett Dec 22 '12 at 13:07
Yes from the (chem *cough* refer *cough* ence site). First copied the source HTML, used Python-Beautiful Soup to get just the periodic <table> part then wrote a program to gather data/properties from the <h1>,<h2>,<h3> and <h4> tags into dictionaries finally output the dictionary contents into a csv file. – Aditya Sriram Dec 23 '12 at 4:23

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