Database Queries with DSN-less ODBC Connections

[dantebothermy]

Friends:

I create excel spreadsheets linked to central SQL Server or Access databases. The difficulty is that often users are unable to refresh the linked data -- even when they have security access to the necessary databases.

Does anyone know a way to set up a spreadsheet so that the pointer to the database is contained in the spreadsheet (so that the spreadsheet will point to the database without setting up DNS links on every user's computer)?

Thanks

[Stang02GT]

In Access you can actually use the spread sheets as tables. Have you tried that yet?

[dantebothermy]

In Access you can actually use the spread sheets as tables. Have you tried that yet?

Thanks for your answer, but I guess my question wasn't clear: I need spreadsheets to link to tables and queries in Access and SQL Server, not vice versa. The problem is how to set things up so that users can refresh the data.

I can easily set this up to work on MY computer with DSN (?) setups. But I can't set up the DSN connections on all of the computers that will use the spreadsheets. Is there a way of setting these up without DSN?

[Stang02GT]

If you link the spread sheets into access as tables then they are automatically refreshed.

If a user makes a change to the spread sheet it will show up in Excel. If you make a change in access it is going to show up in the spread sheet. So there is no need to refresh the data.

[dantebothermy]

Once again, I have not made my question clear.

I have "live" database tables maintained in SQL Server. I have created Excel spreadsheets to summarize information from that database. I'd like users to be able to refresh the data in these reports so they can reflect the most recent data in the SQL database.

I can easily set this up to work on MY computer with DSN (?) setups. But I can't set up the DSN connections on all of the computers that will use the spreadsheets. Is there a way of setting these up without DSN?