Office 2013 In Depth

Working with External Data

Excel provides you with a number of options for getting external data into a worksheet. After you import data from another source or connect to a data source such as a database server, you can then use Excel’s wide variety of capabilities to work with the data. The fact that Excel is an extremely powerful number cruncher means that you can probably perform calculations and data analysis that would be extremely time consuming or very labor intensive in another software application, such as Microsoft Access.

Excel makes it easy to import data from other applications or database servers. The Get External Data group commands on the Data tab enable you to import data from Access, web tables (on websites), text files, and ...