Chapter 4
Grabbing Data from External Sources
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding external data sources
Exporting data from other programs
Importing data into Excel
Grabbing data from the web
Querying an external database
In many cases, the data that you want to analyze resides outside Excel. That data could be in a text file or a Word document, on a web page, in a database file, in a database program, such as a corporate accounting system, or on a special database server. Alas, you can’t analyze anything that’s hunkered down “out there” in a file, a program, or a server. Instead, you have to figure out a way to get the data “in here,” by which I mean that you import the data into an Excel workbook and in the form of an Excel table. Importing can be a challenge, but fortunately, Excel offers many powerful tools for importing outside data.
You can use two basic approaches to grabbing external data that you want to analyze. You can export data from another program and then import that data ...
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