Building and using a relational
database in Excel (with a little help from MS Query)
Introduction to a relational database
A relational database consists of some number of tables, each
of which contains information about some business aspect.
Each column in the table identifies a key component of the data
stored in the table while the rows contain the actual
information itself. Further, each table is related
to one or more of the other tables by a key piece of shared
information. For example, a financial institution might
have three tables called Customers, Account Types,
and Customer Accounts, and the Customer and Customer
Accounts table sharing the Customer Number and the
Account Types and Customer Accounts sharing the Account
Type.
Each of the tables is in its own spreadsheet in the same
workbook. The sheet names reflect the table names as in:
The Customer table contains information about
customers and looks like:
The Account Type table identifies the types of
accounts the bank offers and looks like:
