I have been programming for more than 3 years, of course exclude the university time. Most of the time, i work with web development based on C#, ASP.NET with SQL Server. However, honestly speaking, i am not good at SQL. I just work with basic functionalities which are required to make CRUD operations.

One day, my boss gave me a task which required me to look at closely at SQL database and excel. And they were not my fields at that time, especially excel 🙁

After a couple of weeks working with requirements, i am not talking detail about the logic of task here, with the help of my boss, i have had those new things for myself, not really new for you 🙂

In summary, my task was: extract data from SQL database and format into excel file and then finally import that excel file into a new system. And the original data was not well organized and correct.

To do the extracting, i made a small window app. But the difficult thing was checking the data. Here are my steps:

1. We have many ways to import data into SQL server. Here i work with Excel. So i import data from excel into SQL.
2. After importing data in excel, you can customize it and make some query to get the data back
3. Then do copy and paste the data into excel again.
4. Make graph or any calculations to check the data again what you had so far.

The point here is that, after doing this task, i like to work with SQL and Excel more than ever. They are really nice tools.