Microsoft® Office Excel 2003 Programming Inside Out

Chapter 25. Excel and the Web

HTML

Using the Internet as a Data Source

Using the Internet to Publish Results

Using Internet Solutions with Excel

Back in the day, a typical Microsoft Excel–based application was almost entirely contained within Excel itself; the only external interaction would be with the user. The user would provide the data and then present the results. If you needed to store the data, you would use separate worksheets and try to simulate a relational database as best you could.

As data access technologies developed from Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers, through Data Access Objects (DAO) to the current versions of ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), it became more commonplace to store data in external databases and even retrieve data ...