Summary: The purpose of this KB article is to provide instructions for how to make your Microsoft Excel spreadsheet “data ready”
Audience: NUSD staff
Source: Geoff Lilley Excel Training Manuals
No, Excel is not a database. Yes, Excel plays very nicely with databases. What’s a database? Illuminate, infinite-campus, SEIS, CALPADS, Infinite Campus, QCC, QSS, AESOP, just to name a few.
How do these relate to Excel? Generally speaking, they all have the ability to export data that plays nice with Excel.
Before we go exporting to Excel, though, a couple of pointers on how to make the data Excel-ready:
- Make sure that the first column of your export is a unique identifying piece of information about that row of data. For example, if I’m exporting student records, the Student ID would be a good one; if I’m exporting personnel data, I might use the Employee Number.
- Make sure that you have a header row; if you can make this happen in the export, so much the better; if you have to wait to get it into Excel, make that your first priority.
- Wait, what’s a header row? It’s a row of information above the data that tells the viewer what it is; so column A might be Student ID, column B might be Last Name, column C might be First Name. You get the idea.
- How many of those header rows do you have? Say it with me, say it loud, say it proud: ONE. O-N-E. If you need to group or break up the data by some factor (school name, grade level, class name), then use the header row, and let Excel help.
- If you know in advance that you want to sort the data (by school name, by student last name, whatever it may be), do that before you export the data. Why? Because database programs are faster and more efficient about that process than Excel. No fooling.
- In like fashion, if you know in advance that you want only the female 9th graders from Natomas High, instead of all of the 9th graders from the whole district, filter out those extraneous rows in your database program before you ever even export it. Same reasoning.
- While Excel can read darn near any data file, your best bet is to save it as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) or a Text Tab Delimited (.txt) file. If you have the choice between the two, it matters very little which one you choose.