Using Microsoft Office for
Mac as a Relational Database
By Jim Gordon, co-author of Office 2011
for Mac All-in-One For Dummies.
Part 6 - SQL and queries in
Office for Mac
A query is a question are you ask
of your database. The answer is delivered as a result set in a
query table.
Queries are made in Structure Query Language generated by
typing SQL expressions (Excel 2011 and Excel 2016) or
generated for you in the graphical user interface (GUI) of
Microsoft Query (Excel 2011 only). Queries can also be
generated using Visual Basic for Applications, AppleScript,
and possibly JavaScript (Excel 2016 only). Queries are of two
types:
- "Flat file" involves querying
just one table from a source database
- "Relational" involves a query
sourced from 2 or more tables joined together
This tutorial does not include
teaching SQL or database design. There are lots of sites on
the Internet that teach SQL. Click
here for an index of SQL LITE commands from Oracle
corporation. The commands should work when using Excel
or other data sources, not just when using Oracle as a data
source. If you want practice learning SQL, get this college
textbook called A
Guide to SQL
by Phillip J. Pratt and Mary Last and try each query example
in the book.
This tutorial provides examples of SQL syntax in Microsoft
Query that you can combine with other examples found
elsewhere.
The syntax in Microsoft Query SQL is slightly different from
Microsoft Access and other database products. The difference
usually involves typing a different character on occasion. For
example, in Microsoft Query you may need to type a square
bracket instead of single quotes used in other SQL
implementations.