MacLochlainns Weblog

Somebody was trying to query Oracle via Microsoft Excel 2007, and didn’t have an Oracle ODBC Data Source that enable them to choose Oracle. I’d referred them to this post on adding MySQL’s ODBC driver to Windows 7 but that didn’t help enough. Posting this screen shot may not have helped either.

It appears I assumed too, like everyone would know that it’s on Windows 7 when Oracle 11g (or another Oracle database) is installed locally. The person who posed the question doesn’t have Oracle installed locally and can’t install it.

For those who don’t have an Oracle instance running locally, you can download the Oracle Data Access Components for Windows from the Oracle web site. It’s in the driver sections, as shown in the screen capture below:

This driver contains the necessary OLE DB and ODBC drivers, as you can see in this screen shot.

Once you’ve downloaded it, you can return to this post where you set up an Excel query against a remote Oracle database. You should take note that Microsoft’s future direction adopts Oracle ODBC, like the approach they’ve chosen with MySQL’s ODBC driver. As always, I hope this helps.