I was recently working on a project at my job that required me to make a huge database of information in an excel document. The goal of the project was to allow my company to have an organized place for them to keep track of their projects. They planned on keeping all of the projects in the excel file and just searching for projects by hand if they needed to find a certain one. I thought this sounded a little crazy, so my goal was to take the project online and build a search engine out of the data. However, I was a bit lost in terms of how to start doing this since I thought that I would have to retype all of the information into an SQL database. This didn't sound like very much fun to me since the excel file had nearly 4,000 cells of information already. Fortunately, I found a very easy way to make a MySQL database directly from information you've already created in an excel file. This is something that even novice web builders can manage, so don't worry if you're not too familiar with databases. This tutorial will assume that you have access to CPanel. This is a very common website management program that usually comes pre-installed on most hosting servers. You'll also need access to PHPMyAdmin. This is a program that will allow you to work with and create new MySQL databases. It's a very simple and easy to use program. This also usually comes pre-installed if you have CPanel on your server. Once you've got those two things, you're ready to begin! One thing to keep in mind is that it will be easier to work with excel files that do not have a ton of formatting such as colors and merged cells. Try to make your excel layout as simple as possible. The reason for this is that you'll be turning your original excel file into a CSV file. A CSV is basically a version of your excel file that has all of the data separated by commas. In order to make sure that your CSV file has been created properly you'll need to have access to a plain text editor. If you're using a Mac you can use Text Edit. If you're on a Windows computer you can use Notepad. All you have to do is open up your CSV file in one of these text editors and make sure your data is displayed properly. All of these steps will be explained in the video, so check it out for more information. This process only takes a few minutes and it's a really useful technique to know for future projects. Hope you enjoy!

Check out the author’s other blogs:  san francisco jobs and sales jobs bay area.  Patrick writes about web development and design.

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