If you have ever experienced a typical Excel frustration when, on recalculating a spreadsheet that you have just received from a co-worker, none of the database VBA macros work, you will quickly realize the advantages of Anima's transparent database connectivity. More often than not, missing ODBC data source entries in the client machine will render those macros, thus the whole spreadsheet, useless.

Building further up on enterprise-wide Excel Models, Anima implements one of the most efficient and transparent mechanisms to bring relational data into any spreadsheet, whereby any number of stand-alone (i.e. non-VBA and non-ODBC) data-retrieving macros can be included in a model. The macros can take any number of input parameters from the spreadsheet's cells and can be connected to a SQL query defined in simple text in Anima's system administrator's GUI. As with all of Anima's data elements, both the query and the DB connection information are centrally defined, thus are always guaranteed to be there for every Anima-enabled Excel in the network. Figure 1 illustrates this with an example SQL query.

For those cases where mission-critical or legacy data are stored in text files or as web pages, remote Perl scripting provides a very efficient way of bringing these data into Excel. And just like SQL scripts above, they can be easily defined, parameterized, and deployed as part of any of Anima's standard Excel model.