I'm trying to automate a tedious problem. I get large Excel (.xls or .csv, whatever's more convenient) files with lists of people. I want to compare these against my MySQL database.*

At the moment I'm exporting MySQL tables and reading them from an Excel spreadsheet. At that point it's not difficult to use =LOOKUP() and such commands to do the work I need, and of course the various text processing I need to do is easy enough to do in Excel.

But I can't help but think that this is more work than it needs to be. Is there some way to get at the MySQL data directly from Excel? Alternately, is there a way I could access a reasonably large (~10k records) csv file in a sql script?

This seems to be rather basic, but I haven't managed to make it work so far. I found an ODBC connection for MySQL but that doesn't seem to do what I need.

• In particular, I'm testing whether the name matches or whether any of four email addresses match. I also return information on what matched for the benefit of the next person to use the data, something like "Name 'Bob Smith' not found, but 'Robert Smith' matches on email address robert.smith@foo".