This is a guest post written by Joel Zaslofsky, author of Experience Curating.
How to Make “Put It in a Spreadsheet” Who You Are (and Not Just What You Do)
It seemed like a crazy question:
Could I use my passion for Excel as motivation to transform my leaky brain from a weakness into a strength?
Sure, I already had a fifteen year love affair going with Excel.
Every other email I sent to my co-workers had an attached Excel spreadsheet. And when I wasn’t using Excel for work purposes, I was using it for grocery list templates or budget tracking.
But I had to discover the answer to my crazy question.
So I told my wife Melinda in January 2012, “Honey, this is the year I put it in a spreadsheet!”
As I reveal in my article Spreadsheets and You, Melinda shot me a puzzled look. Was I joking? Should she ask me to elaborate?
She gingerly responded, “You’re going to put what in a spreadsheet?”
I shot her back a grin and said, “Everything!”
Experiences with videos, books, recipes, quotes, songs, online content, conversations, fleeting thoughts … everything. Little did I know that I was about to experience the gorgeous love child of curating and spreadsheets.
Hold on to your hat, my friend. You’re about to see how I use Excel to curate my entire existence. It’s something I call “Experience Curating,” and this is where things gets juicy.
The Power of Excel: Formulas and Numbers Optional
Wait a moment.
Isn’t there a Chandoo policy against publishing posts without awesome formulas or behind-the-scenes Excel strategies?
Fortunately, there isn’t (thanks, Chandoo!).
I respect my Excel-loving friends who can run VLOOKUP and macro circles around me. But unlike most people who use Excel for data analysis and number crunching, I enjoy it for the simplicity.
In fact, most of my spreadsheets have no formulas and some don’t even contain numbers.
Spreadsheets without formulas or numbers?! Blasphemy! Why even bother … right?
However, you probably know and love a few unconventional uses for Excel like creating role playing games or playing Super Mario World or Space Invaders. I just happen to know a lot of uncommon ways to use Excel with surprising results.
The most unconventional and best way I’ve tapped into Excel’s functionality has to be Experience Curating, though. In fact, it was so powerful that I spent a year writing a popular book about it.
Experience Curating is a three-part blueprint that empowers you to recognize, capture, organize, and share your most valuable moments. The first part builds the mindset that everything can be curated to benefit yourself and others. The second part integrates the six-step FAOCAS framework that makes any experience meaningful. And the last part applies the tools and best practices to grow actual curating currency.
I can’t convince you here that spending 0.1% of your time adding value to the other 99.9% through curating is worth it. And I can’t explore the nuances of the FAOCAS framework – Filter, Archive, Organize, Contextualize, Access, and Share – on Chandoo’s platform.
What I will do is show you how to use Excel to keep your most valuable experiences tidy, accessible, and sharable. What you use your curated experiences for – making money or personal finance mastery, improving your relationships, truly useful to-do lists, or world domination (for instance) – is up to you.
Using Excel to Curate (Even Excel Resources)
Since you like Chandoo, I assume you want to rock at Excel. Actually, I bet you’ve seen many Excel-related resources that you’d like to revisit or share with this community.
But it’s time to answer some tough questions like:
- Are you archiving those Excel-related blog posts, knowledge base articles, YouTube videos, and other experiences?
- Have you organized your Excel resources “experience elements” – the who, what, when, where, why, and how of an experience – in a logical and meaningful way?
- Did you preserve the context of the content creator and add your personal layers of valuable context?
- Can you access your Excel resources when, where, and how you want?
- Can you share your resources quickly and with attribution to the source?
It’s OK if you answered no to any of these questions. Follow these steps, or customize them for your unique needs, and you’ll be answering yes in no time.
- Define your curated spreadsheets’ goal(s): In this example, the goals of the spreadsheet are to capture, organize, preserve context, instantly access, and share (when necessary) your Excel-related resources.
- Determine how many worksheets you need. My default is just one worksheet so that I can quickly see, sort, and filter everything in one place. You, however, may want multiple tabs so you can do fancy formula and visualization stuff that I don’t even know about. The decision is up to you.
- Identify your sort and filter needs. Knowing how you want to sort and filter your workbook helps decide how many and what type of experience elements would be useful. Is sorting by tag or experience creator essential? Is filtering by resource topic category or subcategory important? Whatever column headers (a.k.a. experience elements) you need to slice and dice should be required columns. Everything else can be optional.
- Create a simple instruction manual. Each experience element should have a logical name, a clear purpose, pre-defined acceptable values (preferably with data validation), a realistic example, optional general notes, and be either required or optional. You don’t want to leave this critical foundation in your ever-changing memory or subject to interpretation. Fortunately, it’s easy to create an instruction manual in a separate worksheet. Check out my example if you want to see Experience Curating in action.
- Think about the visual formatting. My minimalist nature seeps into Excel as I use almost no color and little overall visual formatting. But I still contemplate the ideal margins, orientation, header, footer, print area, and printed paper size in case someone else might want a physical version. I also choose a column’s cell format (e.g., text, number, or date), font (I like 11 point Arial), and text alignment (e.g., wrapped or indented) that’s ideal for each experience element column.
- Create a pre-populated list of labels for your required experience elements. Each pre-populated list lets me turn off my brain and rely on a set of labels that I determined with intention. I especially like data validation here so I’m prevented from entering a label that’s not part of my pre-populated lists. As a best practice, I also add customized error messages that prompt me to use an existing label or add a new one to the pre-populated list.
There are tons of best practices around this process in Experience Curating, but these six steps will let you curate any combination of topic and medium in Excel.
If only the millions of Evernote or Facebook users knew what they were missing when they don’t use Excel to curate!
Excel + Experience Curating = Awesome
What Chandoo does with Excel is magical.
What a master curator like Robin Good does with Scoop.it, Zeef, or hundreds of other tools is inspiring.
Now imagine combining the best of Chandoo with the best of Robin Good.
That’s what Experience Curating is all about.
It takes little energy and time. And since you already have Excel, you have no extra investment to make.
Pick a single topic you like and start curating it in spreadsheets. In fact, I’ll make it easy on you. Here’s your first resource to put in your new spreadsheet … and it’s about spreadsheets: Skilledup’s 133 Excel Resources: Tutorials, Guides, Add-ins, Templates, & Courses.
Need to expand the combination of your curated topics and mediums beyond spreadsheets and Excel? Just use another Experience Curating template, the Curated Topics and Medium Tool Decision Grid.
Spend two minutes now to curate this post so you or someone else can benefit from it later. The proven process of the FAOCAS framework can help if you need it.
Your experiences don’t just happen to you. They can make big things happen for you.
Preferably in Excel, of course.
For the comments: What other ways do you know of to use Excel unconventionally? What tweaks would you make to the Experience Curating framework to make it even more valuable with Excel?
Added by Chandoo: Thank you Joel
Many thanks to Joel for writing this article and sharing an interesting & powerful way to use Excel to make ourselves smarter, better & more awesome. Exactly the kind of stuff that gets me excited.
If you enjoyed the article & want to put everything in Excel, take a minute and say thanks to Joel. Also, check out his book for understanding more about experience curating.
Note about the links to Joel’s book: I am using my amazon affiliate link for Joel’s book. That means Chandoo.org make a few cents, if you choose to purchase it thru my link. I genuinely like Joel’s book & I think you will enjoy it too. I would have recommended it even with out the affiliate link.
About the Author
Joel Zaslofsky is the creator and author of Experience Curating. When he’s not enjoying nature, working on his Smart and Simple Matters show, or chasing his sons around the house, he’s cranking out useful stuff at Value of Simple. Stop by to download the free tools that he and countless others use to simplify, organize, and be money wise.
41 Responses to “SQL Queries from Excel”
I use this method very often.
I always use =SUBSTITUTE (ColumnWithText,"'","''")
to be sure that potential apostrophe in text columns are doubled as required in SQL.
Awesome ! I don't use excel very often so the substitute thing is gold to me 🙂 thanks !
@Leonid.. that is a good technique to use substitute to clean up text apostrophes. thanks
Goal:
Generate update statement in excel where the columns that can be updated are dynamic
You want the columns which are not updated to keep the same value
(or not be overwritten with NULL values with the new generated statement)
the statement can be applied to multiple rows in excel for the same column headers
(This is why the '$' exist for the column headers that are being set)
A1 = First_Name
B1 = Last_Name
C1 = Middle_Name
="
UPDATE PERSONS "&CHAR(10)&
" SET 1 = 1 "&CHAR(10)&
IF(LEN(TRIM($A2))=0,"",", "&$A$1&" = '"&$A2&"'"&CHAR(10))&
IF(LEN(TRIM($B2))=0,"",", "&$B$1&" = '"&$B2&"'"&CHAR(10))&
IF(LEN(TRIM($C2))=0,"",", "&$C$1&" = '"&$C2&"'"&CHAR(10))&
" WHERE name = 'staticordynamicvalue' AND gender = 'staticordynamicvalue'
"
Output (if all columns are set):
UPDATE PERSONS SET 1 = 1,
First_Name = 'Joe',
Last_Name = 'ORien',
Middle_Name = 'Richard'
WHERE age = 28 AND gender = 'm'
Output (if only First _Name (A1) is set):
UPDATE PERSONS SET 1 = 1,
First_Name = 'Joe'
WHERE age = 28 AND gender = 'm'
Possibly my post above is confusing without the actual table to look at. I will do the same example with the table used here. Instead of an insert statement I will generate an update statement for the columns, Cust_Name, Phone & E-mail
where we can generate an update statement for any column individually or together. 🙂 I hope this can help.
=”
UPDATE table “&CHAR(10)&
” SET 1 = 1 “&CHAR(10)&
IF(LEN(TRIM($A2))=0,”",”,Cust_Name = ‘”&$B3&”‘”&CHAR(10))&
IF(LEN(TRIM($B2))=0,”",”, Phone = ‘”&$C3&”‘”&CHAR(10))&
IF(LEN(TRIM($C2))=0,”",”, E-mail = ‘”&$D3&”‘”&CHAR(10))&
” WHERE Cust_Name = ’Bill Gates'
”
Thanks, it has been very useful !
It saved me at least 30 minutes, and time is the most expensive thing in our world...
Hey Paul,
What if any of A2, B2, or C2 is a date field?
The formula above is taking date as string. Any solution?
Even I faced the same problem. If any of the above columns are date, it is taken as string. Any work around for this?
I've found the string concatenation method works well.
At the risk of sounding spammy I would mention that
if it's something your are doing regularly it might be worth investigating a tools
that make it easier, such as QueryCell, an excel add-in I've developed.
It gives you a right click menu option that will produce and then customize insert statements for the selected region of Excel data.
Cheers
Sam
Hi,
For inserting the excel data to your SQL table, you can create insert statements in excel file according to your columns.
then just execute the statements all at once, it will insert the required data to sql server table.
thanks,
How...?
I tried to generate t-sql insert queries from the above example
="insert into values('" &A2 &"','" & B2& "');"
but it generates on one record instead of all records from excel sheet.
I'm using Excel 2003 and the excel sheet contains 922 records.
Most data bases can generate DDL for any object but not a lot of them allow generation of INSERT statements for the table data.
The workaround is to make use of ETL Tools for transferring data across servers. However, there exists a need to generate INSERT statements from the tables for porting data.
Simplest example is when small or large amount of data needs to be taken out on a removable storage media and copied to a remote location, INSERT..VALUES statements come handy.
There is a number of scripts available to perform this data transformation task. The problem with those scripts that all of them database specific and they do not work with textiles
Advanced ETL processor can generate Insert scripts from any data source including text files
http://www.dbsoftlab.com/generating-insert-statements.html
Super Aiticle. Thanks for this post.
I used to deal with the same problem, until found this awsome and free tool.
http://www.xtrategics.com/shapp/String%20Handler.application
regards,
Hi ,
i need a sql query to update a DB in excel 2010..
i have the query(SQL) for insert in excel as ,
="insert into customers values('" &B3 &"','" & C3 & "','"&D3&"');"
similarly i need q sql query for update in excel
i want clear formulas only for insert,delete,update,select
Hi !
I would like to thank you so much ! This trick saves me a lot of time. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it !
-Ankit
You may like to take advantage of this unique tool 'Excel to Database'.
(free for 60 days)http://leansoftware.net The Excel-to-Database utility enables you to validate and transfer data from Microsoft Excel or text file to a database table or stored procedure process. Any text data can be pasted into the application, this may be from another Excel sheet or from text files such as CSV format. SQL Server, Access, MySQL, FoxPro .. Application features Some unique features of Excel to Database include: ?Easy to use color coded/traffic light data validation ?Data is validated as soon it is typed or pasted into Excel ?Upload Excel data to a table or stored procedure process ?Allow default values ?Mandatory/must have fields can be specified ?Allow user friendly column names ?Allow excel formula / calculated fields ?Multiple database type support: Microsoft SQL Server, Access, MySQL and others (to be tested) ?Supports Custom SQL scripts, with SQL/Excel merge fields ?Database validation checks ensure you comply with any rules defined within the database ?Multiple Task configuration ?For co-operative use, Tasks can be shared across a network ?Task configuration is password protected http://leansoftware.net
Its works fine for single record.
I want to update 1000 records in DB. Can you help me.
[...] [...]
Excel database tasks 2.3 (EDT)
you can now load directly from any source into Excel, validate and upload to most SQL database platforms including SQL Server with automatic transaction wrapping.
You can also use EDT as a multi-user application by easily designing your own Edit data tasks and deploying EDT on your users workstations.
Automatically creates UPDATE/INSERT statements based on the primary key. Default SQL can be modified as you require.
Makes the best use if Excel power - formatting, formula, validation, conditional formatting.. without creating any problematic spreadsheets!
Release details on the blog:
http://leansoftware.net/forum/en-us/blog.aspx
Thanks for the interest
Richard
Thanks for the valueable information, it really help me alot.
Thanks again.
As I do with a field of type date?
= "UPDATE SET business datetime =" & "'" & A2 & "' WHERE ID =" & B2 & ""
the date is not 03/10/2012 is 41246. Even putting quotes ...
Please show how to do it properly with dates as well as when those dates are empty. Thanks!
In a separate column make the date to Text using below formula
=TEXT(C2,"mm/dd/yyyy") Then Refer this text column in your update statement
Great post saved me a a load of time on a task i had to complete
thanks for sharing article... helpful!
Thanks 🙂
Hello,
Nice article.
I have also created one tool for create table script using excel http://devssolution.com/create-table-in-sql-using-excel/
Please check it.
Thanks & Regards,
Sandeep Bhadauriya
[…] Excel formula used – http://chandoo.org/wp/2008/09/22/sql-insert-update-statements-from-csv-files/ […]
If any one can help me out with following.
I want to know a SQL query of below excel formula:
=LOOKUP(0,-SEARCH(LEFT(F2,LEN($B$2:$B$100))+0,$B$2:$B$100),$A$2:$A$100)
Excel data is as below;
Name Codes
names1 992
names2 57
names3 856
names4 297
names5 63
if there is a number (29756789) then it should search in sql by taking the prefix of number (297) from (29756789) and return the name field (name4).
Codes can be of two digit or three.
Thanks
Here is a link to an Online automator to convert CSV files to SQL Insert Into statements:
CSV-to-SQL: http://csv-to-sql.herokuapp.com
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1570387/how-to-insert-data-from-an-excel-sheet-into-a-database-table/37409790#37409790
="INSERT INTO table VALUES (" &A3 &",'" & B3 & "','"&C3&"','" & D3 & "','" & E3 & "'," & F3 & "," & G3 & "," & H3 & ",'" & I3 & "'," & J3 & ");"
B3 has date data that looks like 9/22/17 but with the formula above b3 is coming out as 43000?
how do i fix that?
I just want to insert the Excel records in Sql table without Visiting SQL.
basically i m just want to run a command in Excel Only.
Help Me..plz..?
Hi I have a question maybe you guys have an answer for me
="insert into customers values('" &B3 &"','" & C3 & "','"&D3&"');" where B3, C3, D3 refer to above table data.
the above technique works but is there a way to write it so it takes a range instead of individual columns. because I have an extremely wide table
="insert into customers values(B3:D3);" where B3, C3, D3 refer to above table data.
Awsome
Its Great Effort to help everyone who working with excel.
Thanks for the mini-tutorial on SQL from Excel. Didi it several years ago, but couldn't remember the syntax! All the dialogue was really helpful as well!
The formula above is taking date as string. Any solution?