By Michael Nocito, data analyst · Published August 8, 2026
By the end of this page your spreadsheet will pull its numbers straight from a database, so next month's report is one Refresh All instead of an export, a paste, and a silent prayer that you pasted into the right columns. The path is Data, then Get Data, then From Database , and the rest of this page is the parts that go wrong after that.
Here is what to actually do today. Connect to one table you currently copy by hand, load it to a worksheet, and press Refresh once to watch it update. Do not rebuild your whole report yet. One connected table teaches you the whole mechanism.
The short version: Excel has a built-in tool called Power Query that holds the connection and the cleaning steps, so both replay on demand. SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL and others are in the menu. SQLite is not, and section 5 is what to do about that.
The difference between a paste and a connection is the one idea worth the page, so it gets the picture.
