Creating connections to MySQL in Excel

Oracle has released a plugin for Excel called MySQL for Excel. This plugin gives you a simple-to-use window in the MySQL database using a DSN connection, which makes reading the data from tables simple and even provides a direct connection to the tables, allowing you to edit and update, delete records, and add new records. In this section, we will briefly look at these features to finish off our dashboard and to permit direct data editing on key tables. MySQL for Excel should have been installed when you installed MySQL; if not, return to the MySQL installation pages in the Preface for installation instructions. We will be concentrating only on importing data for display and editing. There are many more interesting features in MySQL for Excel that are not addressed in this book that may be worth following up.

Exercise 12.03 – creating a connection to MySQL

In this exercise, we are going to start MySQL for Excel and describe the opening...