Excel® VBA: 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 23. Managing External Data

One of the most versatile and useful benefits of Excel is its ability to import data from external sources. In Lessons 26-30 you will see examples of sharing data back and forth with other Microsoft Office applications from Excel.

Prior to Excel 97, the data that a person would be working with was entered into Excel manually. An Excel workbook was essentially a self-contained object that produced and stored its own data, having almost no contact with the outside world except for the person working in the project.

Starting with Office 97, Microsoft has been devoted to providing more and better tools for importing and exporting data to the Internet, database programs, and text-related software applications. Excel leads the way in this effort among all Office applications. In this lesson, you learn how to use VBA to share data between Excel and other external sources, including Access, the Internet, and text files.

CREATING QUERYTABLES FROM WEB QUERIES

The Internet as we know it has only been around since the mid 1990s, not that long ago really, but it's hard to imagine what life would be like today without the World Wide Web. The public's desire is only increasing for access to the galaxy of information that is stored on the Web. With each new release of its Office suite, Microsoft has improved the capacity of its applications to interact with web-based information.

Note

When you connect Excel to an external source such as the Internet, you add a QueryTable ...