 One of the things we have to do with Excel is connect to alternate sources of data Because we don't want to have to be the guy who comes in here and types in all this information Notice how it's all blank, but let's say for example. We come down here to fund history Obviously, we're talking about all of the data that this fund has ever received Now I don't want to deal with that. You don't want to deal with that What we can do is we can actually have that information stored to us in another File one of the things we have is say this text file, which has the entire fund history going back from 2013 up to not only today, but actually the future because we like to work with the future So what I can do here is I can actually take this information if you notice it's structured pretty nicely It's pretty Uniform and it's a look and feel what we can do is we can actually take this information and we can do something known as import it into Excel So how do we do that? We start by heading over to our data tab Inside here, you notice immediately that our first section our first section is known as get external data What that'll actually allow us to do is specify where we're getting that information So we were just looking at that text file How would we go about getting that text? From text if we click on this information we get an immediate dialogue box box Asking us where we want to grab that from now It's wherever my other files are that I've downloaded Accordingly in my CH history as I click import I get a nice little wizard that kind of walks me through the process So say for example if we kind of look at our wizard, you see I don't really need rows one two three four or five I actually don't need that information So what I'm able to do is well, I maybe want five But instead of starting my row at or starting my import at row one I could change that to starting at row five start with this being the first thing I get Start with date Now one of the things that we can take note of here is every one of these things is gonna have a sort of Fixed size to it. So here's the start of the low Section and here's the end of it. Here's the start of the close Etc. So what we're able to do is maybe we can use that to our advantage by saying each Field each one of these kind of columns even though they don't exist as columns yet can be its own little thing Now one of the things that happens when I select next is you notice I get a few different arrows here Now what I'm doing is I'm actually specifying that fixed width So say for example, I click and drag this first arrow over a little bit Now I'm saying that that column is gonna be one column going and cutting off right about here Same thing if I bring this over here, I bring this one over here I bring this one over here and now I don't need this guy at all. I actually can I don't need to do this I Can I don't need to what I can do is I can delete that by simply double-clicking on it Now get rid of it. No problem either way now what I can do is I can hit next and it allows me to take what I've seen take what data I'm importing and Give it a little format. So say for example that first section right now It's set to general, but you know the header is telling me it's a date. So why don't I just specify it's a date? Now if we look at it, you know, we're seeing 2013 0401 April Fool's Day Yeah, April Fool's Day. So Instead of it being month day year, it's actually probably more like your month day So that's one thing that we can do if we don't want us particular column to do anything like this one will leave it This one will leave it this one will leave it, but say for example, I don't want open I don't need it. You know, I don't need to know what the the Price was when it opened every day. I don't care about what it was closing that day So what I can actually do is I can come in here and I can say do not include and So what it's gonna do is it's gonna take this and it's gonna skip that column entirely So when I hit finish, I get a final little message asking me where I want it to appear Depending on wherever it appears. I can just specify by clicking on there and when I hit, okay, I Now have all of that information nicely imported into Excel for me Pretty nice