Time for action – connecting from Excel to create reports and charts

You are going to create your Monthly Expenses report and also display it as a chart. This will give you the flexibility to extend reporting and charting capability beyond what is available in the canned GnuCash reports.

1. Prerequisites: Make sure that you have saved your MACS accounts as a SQLite3 database from GnuCash.

2. Prerequisites: Make sure that you have Microsoft Office Excel installed on your system. This tutorial and the screenshots are based on Excel 2003 running on Windows XP. If you have a different version or another operating system, then please look for the equivalent steps.

3. Prerequisites: In order to connect to this SQLite3 database from Excel, you need an ODBC driver. Make sure you have installed an ODBC driver for SQLite3 and created an ODBC DSN to the exported GnuCash accounts file.

4. While you are in a new worksheet in Excel, from the menu, select Data | Import External Data | New Database Query…. The Choose Data...