Chapter 9. Extend Excel
In Excel, you can do more than create and maintain workbooks and worksheets. Through data exchange, you can extend Excel in two ways. First, you can use data from other programs within Excel and thereby apply Excel’s extensive worksheet capabilities to other programs’ data. Second, you can use Excel data within other programs, thereby extending your ability to use, analyze, and present your Excel data. This chapter focuses on the many techniques for integrating Excel with Word, PowerPoint, and Access; querying Web sites; importing data; exporting data; and querying Access databases from Excel.
With queries, you can bring non-Excel data, such as a Microsoft Access table, into Excel. As you create a query, you can sort and filter the data. Later you can analyze and chart the data as you would any other worksheet data.
Queries are a powerful database tool for analyzing data sets. With minor changes, you can extend the tasks in this chapter to exchange data with corporate databases based on Oracle, SQL Server, and other such products.
Less known to Excel users are the query features that enable you to query a Web site within Excel. You can query a Web site and import Web content into Excel. For example, you can import statistics presented in HTML tables.
You can create links from your worksheets to other worksheets and other programs. For example, you can use a link to open a related workbook or a related Word document.
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