Introducing Excel’s Three Types of Spreadsheet Databases
by Charley Kyd on August 6, 2012
Excel offers three general ways to arrange data in your spreadsheet so you can use it as a database with your worksheet formulas:
- Simple Tables, which I’ve used since Excel 2.0.
- Excel Tables, introduced in Excel 2007.
- PivotTables with a Tabular Report Layout, introduced in Excel 2010.
Database experts likely would be offended by my calling any of these a “database.” After all, these three spreadsheet databases are easy to set up and use…not at all like a “real” database. Even so, these databases work like a real database for your Excel formulas. If your reports and analyses can get their data from one of these types of spreadsheet databases, you can improve your reporting and analyses significantly.
In this post, I’ll introduce each type of spreadsheet database. Then in future posts, I’ll go into greater detail. [click to continue…]
Tagged as: databases, Excel tables, GETPIVOTDATA, PivotTables
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{ 1 comment }
This post could not be more timely for me. I’m dealing with a giant “database” excel file organized as a simple table. There are thousands of formulas in the file that I’d like to get rid of in favor of pivot-tables, the problem is that the data is three dimensional.
Looking forward to the next post.