In addition to working with Microsoft Excel data, you may want your application to access data from other sources, such as text files or databases. Microsoft Excel provides several powerful ways to access external data.
The first part of this chapter explores how to import external data as a text file. The next section discusses how to use data access objects to access the data and change the structure of a database. The final section describes how to connect to external database servers or files by using open database connectivity (ODBC).