Chapter 2
Grabbing Data from External Sources
In This Chapter
Exporting data from other programs
Importing data into Excel
Running a web query
Importing a database table
Querying an external database
In many cases, the data that you want to analyze with Excel resides in an external database or in a database application, such as a corporate accounting system. Thus, often your very first step and very first true challenge are to get that data into an Excel workbook and in the form of an Excel table.
You can use two basic approaches to grab the external data that you want to analyze. You can export data from another program and then import that data into Excel, or you can query a database directly from Excel. I describe both approaches in this chapter.
Getting Data the Export-Import Way
You can usually easily export data from popular database programs and accounting systems. Excel is the dominant data analysis tool available to business. Because of this, most database programs and ...
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