| A good place to start is with bad choices. Chapter 1, "Misusing Excel as a Database Management Tool," gives you the details of several horrid examples. Chapter 2, "Excel's Data Management Features," discusses ways to use Excel's worksheet functions to locate and rearrange data on the worksheet. There are some ways to set up a worksheet that is, to lay out its entries that make it much easier for you to manage the data. Chapter 3, "Excel's Lists, Names, and Filters," shows you how to arrange your data effectively. Excel has a variety of ways for you to get data from other sources into your worksheets. Chapter 4, "Importing Data: An Overview," walks you through one of the most powerful of these: external data ranges. This chapter also introduces Microsoft Query and establishing pivot tables based on imported data. Chapter 5, "Using Microsoft Query," goes much further into using Microsoft Query to acquire external data. You'll see how to connect external data tables together and use selection criteria to design exactly the data import you're after. You'll also see how to manage the external data range so that it refreshes itself automatically, fills down adjacent formulas, maintains password protection, and so on. As good as Excel's data import capabilities are, there are a few tricks and traps to be aware of. Chapter 6, "Importing Data: Further Considerations," discusses how to avoid null values, grouping fields in pivot tables, changing your criteria each time you run a query, and how to set up and refresh Web queries. The remainder of Managing Data with Excel is concerned with automating the exchange of data between Excel and true relational databases. Especially when you're moving data out of Excel into another container, the most powerful methods involve Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA. Chapter 7, "VBA Essentials Reviewed," uses lots of sample code to show you how to use loops, understand the object model, declare variables, establish With structures, and work with the macro recorder. All these techniques are discussed in terms of their use in managing data. Chapter 8, "Opening Databases," introduces two important libraries that you use in VBA so that your code will have direct access to structures in databases tables, fields, records, queries, and so on. By using these libraries with VBA, you can manage databases entirely from the context of Excel. If you're going to manage data in a database from inside Excel, it helps to know how to do it from a database management system. Chapter 9, "Managing Database Objects," shows you how to create tables, fields, and queries directly, using the database management system's user interface. With Chapter 9's review of managing data structures from inside a database as a basis, the next chapter shows you how to do the same thing from inside Excel. Chapter 10, "Defining Fields and Records with ActiveX Data Objects and Data Access Objects," has plenty of examples of manipulating them using a combination of VBA and DAO, and of VBA and ADO. Chapter 11, "Getting Data from Access and into Excel with ADO and DAO," examines the most efficient ways to use VBA, ADO, and DAO to move data from a database and into an Excel worksheet. These techniques are especially important when the data can't just be brought back all at once, as with an external data range, but when your code needs to do additional work with the data. You're walked through the development of a lengthy block of VBA code that places the data retrieved from the database in precise locations on the worksheet. Chapter 11 focuses on getting data into Excel from a database. Chapter 12, "Controlling a Database from Excel Using ADO and DAO," looks at the other direction of data flow from Excel to the database. You'll see how to add new records to database tables, edit existing records, and delete those you no longer need all by using a combination of VBA and DAO or VBA and ADO. Special Elements There are several different types of information that we've included in this book to help you along. Case Studies A case study is a problem or situation that you might encounter in the course of your work with Excel almost always, one that requires some extra ingenuity to deal with. All the case studies in this book come directly from situations I've encountered at my company's client sites. But because I really want to do more work for them, I'm not mentioning any names. Notes, Tips, and Cautions NOTE A note is just an extra little tidbit about the topic being discussed. You can easily skip over these, but you might miss a gold nugget!
TIP A tip is the spot where I can relay my own experiences with Excel in the real world and offer suggestions and tricks to help you use Excel more effectively.
CAUTION These are the ones you don't want to skip. The caution will help keep you out of common pitfalls or alert you to potential problems.
Cross References You'll find helpful references to other parts of the book when a topic is covered in more than one way in different chapters or when there is related information to the discussion at hand.  A cross reference is formatted like this and points you to other useful areas in the book.
Conventions You'll find that we've employed some specific conventions to help you easily find what you are looking for and to distinguish certain elements from the rest of the text. The following list outlines those conventions: Mono Font: Mono font is used on most of the code you'll find in this book. Whether it's a function name, VBA code, SQL statements, or any other type of code listing, you'll see it in the mono font. Italic: When you see a word in italics that is to let you know that the word is a new term that is being defined in that location. Bold: In numbered lists, we've bolded items such as menus, buttons, and check boxes so that you can easily pick out the items as you work through the steps.
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