4.1. What Is an External Data Connection?
Excel provides the ability, out of the box, to connect to data outside of Excel. Realizing this opens a whole new world to Excel users, since you can then connect to almost any data lying around in files or to database servers in your organization if you have permission to do so. Excel is one of the best ways to connect to OLAP cubes as well (we'll see what this looks like later in the chapter). When you connect to external data from within Excel, the external data can easily be imported into an Excel spreadsheet, where all the great tools of Excel 2007 can be used to analyze and arrange the data.
In fact, Excel can connect to data on the Internet, and we'll show how to do this in the chapter as well. ...
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