Standalone Blast+; Automating searches, Blastn formatting, interpretation I am struggling with using NCBI's standalone blast, particularly the blastn feature.

I have a large number of nucleotide sequences that I want to use blastn to ID. The goal is to retrieve information from the blast program and eventually import this information to excel. I want to know the capabilities of, or the easiest way, to format the output. I am running a remote search to NCBI's nucleotide database and want to filter and organize the information retrieved as much as possible. The ultimate goal is automate a way to run a remote search to NCBI's nucleotide database, and to work with the results in excel.

I am extremely new to this and struggling to find the best path. From what I can gather, many prefer using external programs, scripts, parsers, interpreters etc to organize their results. I am okay with doing this as well, but would still like to format the output of my blastn search as much as possible beforehand. It is returning a lot of data to me that I don't need.

Can I automate this in excel, and just use VBA/macros to further organize my data? It seems some people prefer to just import the output text file to a spreadsheet and work from there. I have also seen options like BioEdit, eutilities, APIs... I'm not sure which route I should invest my time into figuring out.

Thanks so much for lending your time and expertise!
You just have to change the output format using the -outfmt parameter. To have an output in a tabular format just use -outfmt 6. The resulting table have 12 columns containing the following informations queryacc subjectacc pident length mismatch gapopen querystart queryend subjectstart subjectend evalue bitscore. You may restrict the number of hits per query using -max_target_seqs 5 for example.