As data access technologies developed, from ODBC drivers through DAO to the current versions
of ADO (documented in Chapter 20), it became more commonplace to store data in external
databases and retrieve data from (and update data in) other systems across the network. It is now
quite common to see Excel used as a front-end querying and analysis tool for large corporate
databases, using QueryTables and PivotTables to retrieve the data. The data available to Excel
applications was, however, limited to what was available across the company network, and to
those databases you could get permission to access..