Excel has long had connections to other members of the Microsoft Office family, as well as to databases. With the growth of the Web, Excel developed HTML export capabilities as well, making it easy to publish information created in Excel. Over the last few years , however, Microsoft has developed features that enable you to use Excel as an interface to information published anywhere , and to get your information out of Excel and into other forms ”whatever forms you want, given whatever data you have. At the same time, a number of developers have created ways to get information into and out of Excel spreadsheets without using Excel, and these also have become important gateways.
