“You might be surprised to know that you can connect Excel to a database, and this isn’t limited to databases running Microsoft’s SQL. Excel can connect to practically any mainstream database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and others), provided that the database offers an ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) driver. In this article, you’ll learn how to connect MySQL to Excel.”
I once used excel to recover a damaged Access database.. It worked very well, and weeks of work were saved. (We had no backup)
// … (We had no backup)//
bet that was the last time that happened … right?
people routinely use odbc connections from excel and access to whatever remote databases.
Most users simply use the data without even knowing it resides on an Oracle or AS400 machine, but… ODBC is not really news, is it?
“You might be surprised to know that you can connect Excel to a database”
Actually, i’m not surprised at all.
If i’m not mistaken, you can do this since at least 97…
Edited 2006-06-09 13:40
/nitpickmode on
connect MySQL to Excel
I know people using Excel like a database, but to connect MySQL to Excel seems a bit over the top.
On the other hand, if you’re talking about connecting Excel to MySQL…
/nitpickmode off 😛
You can do anything with Excel that you can do with any programming language … Excel is turing equivalent…
you wouldn’t by any chance haved a turing machine implemented as an excel macro, would you.
*Cough* sorry not really surprised – I guess its just a feature rarely used as its not the common office task .
🙂
…because nobody cares, but that other office suite, you know the one that doesn’t suck, can do this too.
The big question is if it can be done in excel, can you do it in openoffice spreadsheet as well. And if so do we still require ODBC bridge to connect to the mysql database…
ODBC is a standard for how you access a database from an application. Open Office does use it to access MySQL databases.
Yes, you can pull data from MySQL into OpenOffice Calc. I have done it with both the ODBC and JDBC connectors for MySQL. You want to look at the creating a data source in OO Base and then use the DataPilot features in OO Calc.
This can be done since years..
@RenatoRam: Jup, it’s possible to connect to a DB2/UDB, but it can screw it up badly. No damage or so, but the amount of allocated memory for each session is horrible.
since Excel can only display about 65000 rows, this is only suitable for “game” database environments.
Actually, i’m not surprised at all.