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An Excel Database
When Is a Spreadsheet Not a Spreadsheet?
Issue: 16.5 (September/October 2018) Related Web Link(s): Excerpt of article text... In this article I am going to demonstrate how to use Xojo to utilise an Excel workbook as if it were a database and manipulate it using SQL. Using Excel is not something I would recommend for databases, but there are many examples of people using Excel workbooks, or even worse, Word documents to store their client contact information and one day you may need to work with this directly. My suggestion would be, however, to import it into a "proper" database, such as sqlite which comes with Xojo. There is also a great example that ships with Xojo in the This is a Windows-based article. The principles should work the same on Apple Mac, but to use these features on your Mac you will need some ODBC drivers and an ODBC manager. A good place to look for these is Actual Tech (http://www.actualtech.com). The ACESS/Excel driver costs $39.95 at the time I wrote this article. The first thing we are going to need is a quantity of mock data to play about with and I used Mockaroo (http://www.mockaroo.com) to create the test Excel spreadsheet for this article (see Figure 1). Mockaroo lets you generate up to 1,000 rows of realistic test data in CSV, JSON, SQL, and Excel formats for free, and larger data sets for $50 a year. It also has other tools to allow you to create and test APIs, but that's beyond the scope of this article. The range and breadth of the available recordset fields generation is quite staggering, but we will concern ourselves with a relatively simple example which contains 500 records, constructed as follows: ...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Author: Paul Budd
Author Bio: Paul first learned to program on a Vic-20 and spent many hours typing in listings from magazines during that 8-bit era. Although he works full time in a non-computer related industry, he finds time to write software and provide computer consultancy services to friends and colleagues. While owning an Apple Mac, he is predominantly a windows programmer.
Article Description: er>26
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Article Number: 16503
Resource File(s): 
project16503.zip Updated: 2018-08-31 11:09:52ch (http
http://www.mockaroo.comDatabase\Samples folder.