Master the art of loading external data into Excel for use in reporting,
charting, dashboarding, and business intelligence. This book provides a
complete and thorough explanation of Microsoft Excel's Get and Transform
feature set, showing you how to connect to a range of external databases
and other data sources to find data and pull that data into your local
spreadsheet for further analysis. Leading databases are covered,
including Microsoft Azure data sources and web sources, and you will
learn how to access those sources from your Microsoft Excel
spreadsheets.
Getting data into Excel is a prerequisite for using Excel's analytics
capabilities. This book takes you beyond copying and pasting by showing
you how to connect to your corporate databases that are hosted in the
Azure cloud, and how to pull data from Oracle Database and SQL Server,
and other sources.
Accessing data is only half the problem, and the other half involves
cleansing and rearranging your data to make it useful in spreadsheet
form. Author Adam Aspin shows you how to create datasets and
transformations. For advanced problems, there is help on the M language
that is built into Excel, specifically to support mashing up data in
support of business intelligence and analysis. If you are an Excel user,
you won't want to be without this book that teaches you to extract and
prepare external data ready for use in what is arguably the world's
leading analytics tool.
What You Will Learn
-
Connect to a range of external data, from databases to Azure sources
-
Ingest data directly into your spreadsheets, or into PowerPivot data
models
-
Cleanse and prepare external data so it can be used inside Excel
-
Refresh data quickly and easily to always have the latest information
-
Transform data into ready-to-use structures that fit the spreadsheet
format
-
Execute M language functions for complex data transformations
Who This Book Is For
Excel users who want to access data from external sources--including the
Microsoft Azure platform--in order to create business intelligence
reporting, dashboards, and visualizations. For Excel users needing to
cleanse and rearrange such data to meet their own, specific needs.
