If you've ever stared at a web page full of data and thought, "I can see it, so why can't Power Query grab it?", you're not alone. The user who posted this question is clearly skilled with Power Query, yet the Montgomery County court schedule stumped them. That's not a failure of effort; it's a failure of assumption. Too often, we expect every public web page to expose its data through a simple table or an accessible API. But the web is not built for our convenience. It's built for browsers, and that means the data you see is often rendered after the initial page load, buried inside scripts and dynamic calls that Power Query's standard "From Web" option simply won't touch.
This is the real lesson here, and it's one worth internalizing: seeing is not the same as accessing. The court schedule page likely uses JavaScript to fetch and display case listings on the client side, which means the data exists in a separate request, one that your browser makes automatically, but that Power Query doesn't know to make. The good news is that this isn't a dead end. It's a prompt to shift your approach. Instead of trying to scrape the rendered page, you can open your browser's developer tools, head to the Network tab, and watch what happens when the page loads. Somewhere in that list of requests is likely a JSON or XML file that contains the very data you're after. That's your real target. Point Power Query at that URL, and you're no longer fighting the page, you're working with the source.
What this means for you, the user who's comfortable with Power Query but still hitting walls, is that your toolkit is more powerful than you think. You don't need to abandon your favorite tool or learn an entirely new language. You need to add one skill: learning how to see what the browser sees. The Network tab is not just for developers; it's a window into how modern websites actually work. Once you understand that the visible page is often just a shell, and the data lives in a handful of background requests, you'll stop being stumped by these situations. You'll start treating them as puzzles with a known solution. And that's a far more empowering position to be in than feeling like you've hit a wall.
So, if you're the one asking this question, take heart: your instincts are right, and your frustration is justified. The next step is to open the developer tools, find that JSON endpoint, and feed it directly into Power Query. You'll likely need to handle pagination or adjust for query parameters, but that's the kind of challenge you can already solve. The data is there, waiting to be pulled into a clean, refreshable table. You just have to stop trying to take the front door and start looking for the side entrance. That's not a workaround; that's just how the modern web works. And once you see it, you won't unsee it.