Connect Microsoft Excel to InterSystems IRIS via ODBC (Windows)
How to create an ODBC connection on your native Windows laptop to IRIS running on a Windows VM on the same computer, test the connection, and pull data from IRIS into Excel. Recently I learned that Excel can connect to external databases via ODBC. This includes basically any ODBC data source. Since IRIS speaks ODBC via the ODBC API, we can take advantage of the InterSystems ODBC Driver to…
To connect Microsoft Excel to InterSystems IRIS via ODBC on a Windows system, follow these steps. First, ensure you have the latest InterSystems ODBC driver installed on your Windows machine, available on either WRC or GitHub. Ensure you are running IRIS on a Windows VM via VMWare and have Microsoft Excel installed.
Locate the IP address of your Windows VM by opening the Command Prompt (cmd) and typing "ipconfig -all". Look for the line displaying "IPv4 Address" and note the numeric IP address. Also, take note of the Web Server Port of your VM IRIS, which will be required later.
Next, open the ODBC Data Source Administrator (ODBC DSA) on your Windows host system. In the "System DSN" tab, click "Add" to configure the connection. Choose "InterSystems IRIS ODBC" as your driver and click "Finish". Enter a name and description for the data source, input the previously copied IP address, and Web Server Port. Provide the namespace, user name, and password you use for the InterSystems Management Portal. Test the connection to confirm it works successfully.
Once the connection is established, open Microsoft Excel. Go to the "Data" tab, click "Get Data", select "From Other Sources", and then "From ODBC". Select the data source you created earlier and click "OK". In the Navigator, choose the table you wish to connect to and click "Load". Now, you have successfully connected to IRIS data on a VM and can access it in Microsoft Excel running on your native Windows system.
This connection can be useful for leveraging Excel's expertise to explore data, create pivot tables, visualizations, and dashboards.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
