How to Export Instagram Data to Excel: Insights, Public Profile Data & Comments (2026)

"Export Instagram data to Excel" sounds like one task. It is three, and they have almost nothing in common. Your own Insights — reach, impressions, follower demographics — come from Meta Business Suite and only exist for accounts you manage. Public profile and post data — follower counts, captions, likes, comment counts — is available for any public account through the Graph API or a scraper. And comment sections — the actual text people wrote, with usernames and timestamps — are a separate dataset again, and the one most people are really after when they open Excel.

This guide covers all three, in that order, with what each export contains, what it costs, and exactly where each method stops. By the end you will have one workbook with three source sheets and PivotTables joining them, and you will know which parts of the Instagram data you want are simply not exportable by anyone.

The three kinds of Instagram data (and who can get them)

The line that trips most people: Insights are private. If you are trying to get a competitor's reach or their follower demographics into Excel, stop — no tool, paid or free, can export that, and anything claiming to is estimating from public signals. What you can get for any public account is the second and third rows of the table, and the third row is far richer than most people expect.

Method 1 — Export your own Insights from Meta Business Suite

This is the only official Instagram-to-spreadsheet export and it is surprisingly good once you find it. It does not exist in the Instagram mobile app; you need a desktop browser.

1. Open Meta Business Suite → Insights and select the Instagram account (it must be a Business or Creator account connected to a Facebook Page).
2. Choose the date range in the top bar. The maximum window is 90 days per export — for a year of data you make four exports and stack them.
3. Click Export (top right). Choose CSV. Business Suite exports Overview, Content and Audience data in one file.
4. In Excel, use Data → From Text/CSV rather than double-clicking the file so dates and large numbers parse correctly.

What you get: daily reach, impressions, profile visits, website taps, follower gains and losses, and per-post reach, likes, comments, saves and shares. What you do not get: anything about individual followers, and anything before your account became a Business/Creator account. Meta's own documentation of the available metrics is in the Instagram Graph API insights reference, and it is the same list Business Suite exports.

If you want this to refresh itself, the same metrics are available through the API insights endpoints, which Excel can call with Power Query (Method 3 below). Most teams do not bother: a monthly manual export pasted into a source sheet is fine.

Method 2 — Public account and post data (any public account)

For accounts you do not manage — competitors, prospects, influencers you are vetting — the official route is the Graph API's business discovery endpoint. Given a username, it returns the account's follower count, media count, bio, and for each recent post the caption, like count, comment count, timestamp and permalink.

Requirements: a Meta developer app, your own Instagram Business account to authenticate as, and the target must also be a Business or Creator account (personal accounts return nothing). The response is JSON, which Excel imports directly through Data → Get Data → From Web if you paste the API URL with your access token, or through From JSON if you saved the response to a file.

The developer-app setup is the barrier — most marketers give up at App Review. The practical alternatives are no-code scrapers (Apify's Instagram scrapers, Phantombuster's profile scraper) that take a list of usernames and return a CSV of the same public fields. They cost a few dollars per thousand profiles and need no developer account. Whichever you use, you end up with a sheet of one row per post: username, post_url, caption, likes, comment_count, timestamp. That is the join key for everything else — the post_url column is what links post data to its comment export in Method 4.

Method 3 — Excel Power Query directly against the Graph API

If you already have a Graph API token, Excel can be the client. In Power Query, From Web, paste a URL like:

https://graph.facebook.com/v21.0/{ig-user-id}/media?fields=id,caption,like_count,comments_count,timestamp,permalink&access_token={token}

Power Query parses the JSON, you expand the data record into columns, and you have a refreshable table. Click Refresh All and it re-pulls. The same works for the insights endpoints on your own account.

Two caveats that stop most people using this in anger. Long-lived tokens expire after 60 days and must be refreshed, and the token sits in plain text in the workbook's query, so the file cannot be shared. For a personal dashboard it is excellent; for anything a team touches, export to CSV instead. Microsoft's own guide to the connector is the Power Query Web connector documentation.

Method 4 — Comment sections to Excel (the data most people actually want)

The Business Suite export tells you a post got 2,400 comments. It does not tell you what any of them said. The Graph API returns comments only for posts you own, and only if your app has passed review for the comments permission. For any public post — yours or anyone's — the practical route is a comment exporter.

1. Copy the post or Reel URL from the browser address bar or the share menu.
2. Paste it into the Instagram comment exporter. No login and no Instagram credentials are involved — it reads the public thread.
3. Preview the comments, choose Excel (.xlsx) or CSV, and download.

Each row is one comment. The columns are author, username, avatar_url, text, likes, replies, created_at, language, is_pinned, id, reply_to_id. reply_to_id is empty for top-level comments and holds the parent's id for replies, so the thread structure survives the export and can be rebuilt with a lookup. language is detected per comment, which is what makes the country and language pivots later on possible.

Choose XLSX if the file is going straight into Excel: it keeps id and reply_to_id as text. If you take CSV, import through Data → From Text/CSV and set both ID columns to Text before loading — Excel rounds any number past 15 digits, and Instagram IDs are 17–19 digits, so a double-clicked CSV silently corrupts them.

Cost: the first 100 comments of any post are free, three exports a day, no signup. A 3-Day Pass at $14 lifts that to 10,000 comments per post on unlimited posts, and pay-per-export is $1 per 100 comments (minimum $3) if you only need one large thread. For the deep version of this method see how to export Instagram comments to Excel; for pulling comments across many posts at once, bulk export Instagram comments.

Putting the three sheets together in one workbook

The payoff of doing all three exports is that they join. A workable structure:

• Sheet insights — the Business Suite export, one row per day or per post.
• Sheet posts — public post data, one row per post, with post_url.
• Sheet comments — every comment export stacked, with a post_url column you add when you paste each file in.

Convert each to a Table (Ctrl+T) so PivotTables and formulas extend automatically. Then the questions that were impossible from any one export become one-liners:

• Which posts drive comment volume relative to reach? Pivot comments by post_url, XLOOKUP reach from insights, divide.
• What language is my audience commenting in, by post? Pivot comments rows = post_url, columns = language, values = count.
• Who comments most across all posts? Pivot comments by username, sort by count — your top-commenter list, ready for a UGC or ambassador shortlist.
• How many comments are questions? Add a column =ISNUMBER(SEARCH("?",[@text])) and pivot on it — a direct measure of unmet information demand.
• How fast does the thread fill? Group created_at by hour in a pivot to see how many comments arrive in the first hour versus the rest of the week.

Refreshing is manual by design: re-export, paste over the source sheet, PivotTables refresh. For teams that want it automated, the same three sources go into Google Sheets or Power BI — see exporting Instagram comments to Google Sheets for the Sheets version.

What you cannot export, from anyone

Worth stating plainly, because a lot of tools imply otherwise:

• Other accounts' Insights. Reach, impressions, follower demographics, saves and shares are visible only to the account owner. Anything a third-party tool shows for a competitor is modelled from public signals.
• Follower lists. The Graph API does not expose who follows an account, and scraping follower lists is both against Meta's terms and unreliable at scale.
• Private accounts. Nothing — posts, comments, counts — is exportable from a private account by any method.
• Story data for other accounts. Stories are ephemeral and not in business discovery.
• DMs. Not exportable through any public route.

If a plan depends on one of those, the data is not there to be exported and the plan needs to change; every other item in this guide is achievable in an afternoon.

Legal and privacy notes

Exporting your own Insights is what Business Suite is for. Public account and post data through the Graph API is within Meta's Platform Terms; scraping is a greyer area — Meta's terms prohibit automated collection without permission, enforcement is aimed at large-scale and credential-based scraping, and public-only tools that respect rate limits sit at the low-risk end. Comment exports identify individuals by username, so a comment sheet is personal data under the GDPR and comparable regimes: keep it access-controlled, use it in aggregate, and set a deletion date. Do not build ad-targeting audiences from another brand's commenters. The ICO's UK GDPR guidance is a readable reference for what "legitimate interest" covers here.

Quick reference

Related: 3 ways to get Instagram comments out of the app · how to analyze Instagram comments · the Instagram comments API explained.