I just updated to the newest version of Microsoft Excel and saw that they added/updated some querying features. I have seen the querying function before, but it was very very clunky and most of the time unusable. The update seems pretty solid. The functionality could be helpful in a variety of scenarios (commodities, data that needs to be refreshed on a quarterly basis, extracting data from web sources that were previously too onerous or technically difficult to extract into a usable form). Excel is able to crawl a website (say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Stat…), find a collection of data, then import it into excel. The best feature is the ability to refresh the data so that when you have stale data you can quickly update it with a simple click of the refresh button. There is even a query to extract data from Facebook (have not tried this one yet). Very similar to the CapIQ functionality, but now the whole web is at your disposal.
Maybe I missed the boat and this is already in frequent use...Any interesting use cases that you guys can think of in either PE or banking contexts?
Excel > Data tab > New Query
