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From Excel to SQL

Do you work with Excel a lot? Then you're halfway to SQL.

Filtering, sorting, totals per group, looking up data from another sheet: if you work with Excel, you already do what SQL does. Only a spreadsheet gets stuck once the data grows or lives in a database.

With SQL you get that data yourself, exactly the way you need it. And you'll find that a lot of it feels familiar.

Start free with the first lessonNo account needed · a lesson takes a few minutes

Why Lurndo suits you

  • A filter becomes WHERE

    What you do with a filter in Excel, you do with WHERE in SQL. For several conditions at once too, with AND and OR.

  • A pivot table becomes GROUP BY

    Totals and counts per group come from GROUP BY and functions such as SUM, COUNT and AVG, without any dragging.

  • VLOOKUP becomes JOIN

    Bringing in data from another table is done with JOIN, for every row at once and without broken formulas.

  • Sorting becomes ORDER BY

    Ascending, descending, on several columns at once. And with LIMIT you keep just the top five.

A pivot table in SQL

Bike rental De Trapper wants the takings per bike type. Show every bike type with the total of amount.

The modules that connect to Excel

Filtering, sorting, grouping and combining tables. This is where you'll recognise the most.

  1. 2Second dayYour second client: Rewind, the video store in Mechelen. You learn to find exactly the rows you're looking for with WHERE, comparisons, AND/OR/NOT, IN, BETWEEN, LIKE and NULL.
  2. 3Third dayYour third client: the Zomerklank music festival in Hasselt. You learn to sort results with ORDER BY, on several columns, and to remove duplicates with DISTINCT.
  3. 4Fourth dayYour fourth client: De Trapper bike rental in Bruges. You learn to count, add up and average with COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN and MAX, and to summarise everything per group with GROUP BY and HAVING.
  4. 5Fifth dayYour fifth client: football club FC De Kraaien in Lier. You learn to combine tables with keys and JOIN: INNER, LEFT, RIGHT and FULL, with aliases, across several tables and even a table with itself.

Frequently asked questions

Why learn SQL if I know Excel?

A lot of company data lives in databases, and an export to Excel is often too big or too late. With SQL you get exactly what you need yourself, and your query works again tomorrow.

Is SQL harder than Excel formulas?

Usually not. An SQL query reads almost like a sentence, and there are no cell references to juggle. If you can write nested IF formulas, you can certainly learn SQL.

Does SQL replace Excel?

No, they complement each other. SQL gets and shapes the data in the database, Excel is handy to look at it and present it afterwards.

Take the step

Start with the first lesson and recognise what you already know. The first three modules are free.

Start free with the first lesson
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