Is it possible to query a table that is located inside Excel's worksheet? Specifically I am looking for SQL like SELECT and all it's features (sorting, grouping, filtering etc.)
Is it possible to display the result in a different worksheet and dynamically bind the two?
Sound like MS Query might be the tool for you. Basically it is a tool that connects to various external data sources from MS Office, and it can also connect to Excel from Excel. In Excel 2010 things get easier, but you are using 2007.
Check this or this or Google to find various examples of how to implement this.
Related
Is it possible to easily find BigQuery data sources in Google Data Studio by direct connection from BigQuery tables vs custom query? Currently, you will have to open one by one to see if the connection is a direct one or use a custom query.
I have to deal with about 50+ connections and was wondering if there is a better way to see which one has a direct connection to the BigQuery table and which one has a custom query in use. The goal is to build custom tables for the one where we are using custom queries.
Google Data Studio Data Source Tab:
This is not currently supported.
We use SharePoint 2013 as a library to hold thousands of Excel files, with almost never consistent formatting, to manage projects occurring on servers. Somewhere in these maybe formatted as table objects is a common set of server names.
Somehow, without being able to change this process in the short term, I need to pull data from all these files to identify how many projects are targeting a particular server.
I've got access to SQL Server 2016 enterprise, and wondering if something like PolyBase could help with this? I also wonder about SSIS but I don't expect any tables to look exactly like another one.
Other tools may be an option, but I'm not sure what can handle this scale and variety. I think daily updates to the data would be enough, but even so it's still a mess.
How do I pull thousands of varied excel tables into a database? Is this even possible?
Any longer term solution that doesn't allow them to format and annotate like excel is unlikely to actually be adopted.
The less you know in advance, the more difficult it will be...
Some ideas:
Technology
read about FROM OPENROWSET which allows to read from an Excel
read about linked server
Use Excel and its great abilities through VBA to iterate through all your Excel-Sheets, open them, analyse them and fill proper tables. Within Excel you know most about your messy data...
Target structure
You might create thousands of tables, each representing one single sheet in all your Excel files. You could query these tables with dynamically created SQL (using meta-data of INFORMATION_SCHEMA) or think about Full-Text-Search
You might import each sheet into one single XML-structure (SELECT * ... FOR XML PATH('...')). In this case you'd need a target table with columns for Path and name of your Excel, Name of the sheet and an XML column for your data. Another approach was to represent each File on one XML and include all sheets there. Try to define common naming for all your data. Querying XML allows to query columns without knowing their actual names (XQuery with XPath using *).
If your Excels are xlsx already, you might open them with UNZIP and take the existing XML as-is.
To be honest: I do not think that any tool can do the magic to import such a wide range of mess automatically...
I am building a simple database with about 6-7 tables. I will be setting a schedule to do a clean import from a .txt file.
I want to take this data and create a report, like I would do in an excel spreadsheet, convert it to a pdf and post it to our company intranet for those interested to access it.
I'm trying to think of the best way to build my report. Would I just use an excel spreadsheet with a direct connection to the database? Would I create some sort of console application (c/c#/vb/vb.net) that would query the db, generate the report in an excel file, convert to pdf and save?
I'm quite comfortable in these different languages, just not as experienced in the reporting services (although I do have a lot of experience working with EXCEL and VBA Macros) but I want to get into it (SSRS) and get familiar with it as I will be doing a lot of projects like this in the future. This is seems like an easy one to get my hands dirty with and learn and build off of.
Any insight or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks so much!
My suggestion:
Create desired SQL queries to retrieve the data in desired form
Link these queries to your Excel sheet, perhaps directly in form of pivot tables for aggregation of results
Using VBA, you can easily create PDF from the data at the click of a button
The initial design will be time intensive, but after that, everything is automated and one just needs to press the button that creates the PDF.
How to link Access queries to your Excel file:
Data --> Get external Data
You can easily refresh all data whenever you open the Excelsheet by using the code below in the On Open event of the workbook:
ThisWorkbook.RefreshAll
If you need further clarification, do not hesitate to ask
If your end goal is to create a PDF that will be out on your intranet then I would create the report in SSRS. Then you can schedule it to run and output a PDF to your network location.
I've had good experiences using a pivot table in Excel which is a connected table to your SQL database.
In the connection parameters in Excel there is a field where you can define your SQL query, whether it be to call a stored procedure or just a simple SELECT statement.
The main reason I prefer a pivot table SQL connection rather than a normal table connection is because if you have a chart that references the connected table, the chart formatting will be reset when you refresh your connection (if you need to updated your report).
If I use a chart that references a pivot table (or a pivot chart) then the formatting is retained.
I am trying to match existing reporting functionality while building up a new cube for a Proof of Concept.
Can I retrieve data from my cube using an MDX query and put it into a recordset so I can then populate an Excel Sheet with the data?
Have you considered attaching from Excel directly to Analysis Services, and using the built-in drag-and-drop query functionality? Excel will generate the MDX for you.
I've never done it, but it should be possible to integrate ADOMD.NET into a VSTO application, which will then run inside Excel. You might also be able to access some of Excel's MDX query machinery directly that way....
Best way to work with OLAP and Excel is detailed here: Simpler interface for SQL Server analysis services cubes for end users
If you want to write your own MDX instead of using drag-drop, you can't do this with Excel as far as I know. However, most languages would let you fire off some MDX at a cube, and then you could loop the recordset yourself to create a CSV file.
Or even simpler, use SQL Server's Query Analyser like this, and save the results to a CSV:
SELECT TOP 100 * FROM OPENROWSET('MSOLAP',
'Datasource=MyHotServer;Initial catalog=MyLovelyCube',
'SELECT {dimensions(0).members} ON ROWS, {time.defaultmember} ON COLUMNS FROM sales')
(N.B. If you don't know MDX yet....don't start learning unless you really have to! It isn't as easy as SQL, and you can get away without it usually.)
I am trying to reconcile data from a website and a database programmatically. Right now my process is manual. I download data from the website, download data from my database, and reconcile using an Excel vlookup. Within Excel, I am only reconciling 1 date for many items.
I'd like to programmatically reconcile the data for multiple dates and multiple items. The problem is that I have to download the data from the website manually. I have heard of people doing "outer joins" and "table joins" but I do not know where to begin. Is this something that I code in VBA or notepad?
Generally I do this by bulk inserting the website data into a staging table and then write select statments to join that table to my data in the database. You may need to do clean up first to be able to match the records if they are stored differently.
Python is a scripting language. http://www.python.org
There are tools to allow you to read Excel spreadsheets. For example:
http://michaelangela.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/python-excel-file-reader/
You can also use Python to talk to your database server.
http://pymssql.sourceforge.net/
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/devlin-python-oracle.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pydb2/
Probably the easiest way to automate this is to save the excel files you get to disk, and use Python to read them, comparing that data with what is in your database.
This will not be a trivial project, but it is very flexible and straight forward. Trying to do it all in SQL will be, IMHO, a recipe for frustration, especially if you are new to SQL.
Alternatively:
You could also do this by using VBA to read in your excel files and generate SQL INSERT statements that are compatible with your DB schema. Then use SQL to compare them.