I have ten Excel 2010 workbooks, each containing data on former sailors from a U.S. Navy ship. I use them in organizing Navy reunions. The main tabs of each table are organized and formatted identically — one row per sailor, 13 columns of possible data about each sailor (“Possible” because I don’t have all the data for every sailor. Many cells are blank.)
There are currently about 450 sailors in all, with each table holding from 20-120 of them.
I want to be able to extract various totals from all ten workbooks, and keep them all in one place. I also might want to do things like see how many sailors from all ten ships are from Virginia, and list their mailing addresses. (I could do this if my data were in Access tables, but right now it’s in Excel workbooks. I might move it to Access one day, but my Access skills are very rusty.)
I see some stuff online about the Excel Power Query add-in. It sounds like it might do what I want, but it also sounds too good to be true–not necessarily a good combination.
Who knows about this interesting add-in? Is it as good as it sounds? What’s the learning curve? etc.
