Importing, Exporting, and Querying Data

To store or analyze electronic data, the data must be in a format that a software application recognizes. In many cases, you can import data from an external format that your application recognizes, or you can export data to a format that is compatible with a different software application, provided that your specific software application supports these features.

Importing Data

A data import task always originates from the software application that will end up storing or analyzing the data. Before you import data, you must establish a connection to the data source. After you connect to the data source and have imported the data, you can perform data analysis tasks such as formatting and querying.

Note

Although most of the Microsoft data analysis software applications covered in this book support importing data, the applications cannot connect to every type of data source. You should check with a specific application’s documentation to see which data sources the application supports. If a particular data source is not supported, check the documentation for the data source to see whether that application can export the data to a format that is supported.

Exporting Data

With exporting data, instead of making data available in a format your software application understands, you use the application to make data available in a format a different application can work with.

Note

Although all the Microsoft data analysis software applications covered in this book support exporting data, the applications cannot export data to every type of data source.

Querying Data

Similar to filtering data, querying data allows you to select data records that match specific conditions. But querying can do much more than filtering. You can use queries to sort, group, summarize, and trend data. Provided that the information is available, you can also use queries to find out metadata, or the overall properties, of your group of data records. Metadata frequently includes the names of the data fields, who typed the data records, when the data records were created, and so on.

All the data analysis applications described in this book support querying data, but some of the applications, Access for example, allow for more advanced types of queries.