There's a lot of external data that you can import into Excel and analyze. External data is data that is stored outside of Excel, in software accounting systems, mainframes, or databases, for example. By importing the data, you don't have to type it into Excel.

Some of this data may be in text files, a common file format that Excel can read. For example, someone may want you to work with the data from one of the tables in their database, but they can't grant you access to the database. So they convert the data into a text file, and then you can easily import the data into Excel.

To learn more about this course, read the overview in the center of this page or the table of contents in the left column. Then click Next to start the first lesson.

To learn about other ways to import external data, see the following courses:

• Import data: Import external data into Excel
• Import data: Filter external data before importing it into Excel