Excel 2010 Bible

677

CHAPTER

Getting Data from

External Database Files

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding external

database files

Getting started using Microsoft

Query

Working with external data

E

xcel has some great analysis and presentation tools, but these tools
require data. In many cases, the data that you need is available in an
external database. For example, your company may have a database
that contains customer information, sales data, and so on. This chapter is an
introduction to retrieving data from external database files for use in Excel.

Understanding External

Database Files

When you work with an Excel workbook, the entire workbook must be
loaded into memory before you can begin working. Although loading all the
data provides you with immediate access to the entire file and all the data it
contains, it also means that you can’t work with extremely large amounts of
data. Although Excel 2010 supports more than a million rows, actually using
that many rows can slow your system to a crawl — even if your system has
plenty of memory.

Note
Using the 64-bit version of Excel allows you to work with much larger work-
books. But for extremely large data sets, it’s usually more efficient to work
with a subset of the data. n

When you access an external database file using Excel, you can perform a
query to load just a subset of the data into your workbook.