To use Microsoft Excel to access a Booking Pro database you will need a pre-configured Data Source. The easiest way to achieve this is to check the Allow direct access using external programs (eg. Microsoft Excel) option on the Users form in the Security option. If you are unable to do this (e.g. because you are using a non-"bprsolutions" database service) then you will need to speak to your IT Department to set one up for you. Once you have a pre-configured Data Source you should import data as follows:

1. Use the menu option Data->Import External Data->New Database Query to display the following form.

2. Select the BookingPro data source and click OK. (Note the data source is named after the database you are using and may be named slightly different depending on how Booking Pro is installed e.g. it might be called BookingProDB if your database is called that). This will display a login dialog as follows:

3. Enter your Booking Pro User Name as the Login ID and your Booking Pro Password and click OK to display the following form.

4. The Available tables and columns contains a list of views you can retrieve data from. These views correspond approximately to the list of reports available in Booking Pro although not all of the reports have a corresponding view. Select the view you want to retrieve data from and click the > button to add the columns to your query as shown below.

5. Click Next to display the following form from which you can add selection criteria to limit the data retrieved.

6. Click Next again to specify if you want to sort the data by one or more of the fields.

7. Click Next to display the following form.

8. Click Finish to select how you want to return the data to Microsoft Excel.

9. Click OK to import the data into the current worksheet.

You can then analyse the data using any of the features in Microsoft Excel. The most useful are Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts Reports which can be found on the Data menu. These allow you to produce cross-tabular reports and charts and if you aren't familiar with them we would recommend that you invest some time in finding out how to use them.

When you save the worksheet the details of the database query are saved with the worksheet and when you reopen the worksheet you can easily refresh the data from the database using the Data->! Refresh Data menu option. This helps to make this approach particularly useful for producing reports which you need to regularly update.