diff --git a/crawler.py b/crawler.py
index 793af48..2992760 100644
--- a/crawler.py
+++ b/crawler.py
@@ -1,13 +1,36 @@
+import os
 import AdvancedHTMLParser
+import urllib.request
+import xlrd
+import csv
+
 
 # crawls https://www.bundestag.de/bundestag/plenum/abstimmung/2016 for votes in xls format
 # should then evaluate and store the results in a database
 
 parser = AdvancedHTMLParser.AdvancedHTMLParser();
 
-parser.parseFile("bundestag.html")
+url = 'https://www.bundestag.de/bundestag/plenum/abstimmung/2016'
+base_url = 'https://www.bundestag.de'
+content = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read().decode('utf-8')
+
+parser.parseStr(content)
 links = parser.getElementsByClassName("linkGeneric")
 for link in links:
     href = link.getAttribute("href")
     if href.endswith(".xls"):
-        print href
+        filenameIndex = href.rfind('/') + 1
+        xlsFilename = href[filenameIndex:]
+        filename = xlsFilename[:-4]
+        csvFilename = filename + '.csv'
+        urllib.request.urlretrieve(base_url + href, xlsFilename)
+        workbook = xlrd.open_workbook(xlsFilename)
+        worksheet = workbook.sheet_by_index(0)
+        csvFile = open(csvFilename, 'w', newline='')
+        writer = csv.writer(csvFile, quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)
+
+        for rownum in range(worksheet.nrows):
+            writer.writerow(worksheet.row_values(rownum))
+
+        csvFile.close()
+        os.remove(xlsFilename)