How to Connect Snowflake to Excel

This article was developed to describe the steps needed to connect Snowflake to Microsoft Excel.

Installing the ODBC driver

• The ODBC drivers can be can be found at this address: https://developers.snowflake.com/odbc/
• If using Windows, check the version of Microsoft Excel you are using.
  • Open Excel, select "About Excel" and check if it's 32 or 64-bit.
• Accordingly, download the latest version of the ODBC driver file (32-bit or 64-bit) for your system.
• After this, open the file or execute it and follow the instructions to install the ODBC driver.

Adding Snowflake as an ODBC data source

• The next step is to add Snowflake as an ODBC data source so Excel may use ODBC.
• Search for "ODBC Data Sources" in the Windows search bar near the Start button:

• In the window that pops up, be sure the "User DSN" tab is active, and then click the "Add..." button.

• A "Create New Data Source" dialog box will now appear. Select the Snowflake DSII Driver and click the "Finish" button.

• Now, a Configuration Dialog Box should appear. There are at a minimum, four (4) fields that you need to complete (indicated by the red arrows in the image shown below).

	Data Source - The name of the connection and can be named anything you want.
	User - The username which you use to log in to your Snowflake instance.
	Server - This value should be account_identifier.snowflakecomputing.com. For example, if you log in to https://test.snowflakecomputing.com to access the interface, then test.snowflakecomputing.com will be the value of the server that you enter.
	Warehouse - Enter DEFAULT_WH

The other fields are optional and are there if you require them. The password field is not required as the value will not be stored in the ODBC connection that you are completing, but rather at the point of connection in Excel.

With that done, click the "OK" button. Your new connection should now appear in the list of ODBC connections:

Connecting to Snowflake from Excel

• Open Excel and create a new workbook. Then, connect to a new Data source. Click the "Data" tab > Get Data > From Other Sources > From ODBC.
• Another window will now appear. This is where you will have to select the ODBC Connection that you created earlier. You can write the query here by clicking on the advanced option you want to execute or leave blank.
• A new window will appear once you click "OK". This is where Excel will ask you for the actual credentials to log in to the Snowflake instance:

• Enter your credentials and password, and click the "Connect" button.
  • It might take a few moments for Excel to establish the connection.
• Once that's done, another window will appear, giving you a preview of the database or it will give you the preview of data for the query which you ran in the previous step.
• If you did not run the query, you would have access to the database in Snowflake.
• Choose the preferred table by selecting from within "DPP_DATA –> Reader–>"i.e. from database & schema. 
  • "DPP_Data & Reader" refers to the database and schema within Snowflake; it may be named differently depending on the account.
• You can now load all the data in Excel and make the necessary transformations.

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