Today we are going to talk about another new feature included in the latest MySQL for Excel release to date (1.2.0) which can be Installed directly from our MySQL Installer downloads page.

Since the first release you were allowed to open a session to directly edit data from a MySQL table at Excel on a worksheet and see those changes reflected immediately on the database. You were also capable of opening multiple sessions to work with different tables at the same time (when they belong to the same schema). The problem was that if for any reason you were forced to close Excel or the Workbook you were working on, you had no way to save the state of those open sessions and to continue where you left off you needed to reopen them one by one.

Well, that's no longer a problem since we are now introducing a new feature to save and restore active Edit sessions. All you need to do is in click the options button from the main MySQL for Excel panel: 

And make sure the Edit Session Options (highlighted in yellow) are set correctly, specially that Restore saved Edit sessions is checked:

Then just begin an Edit session like you would normally do, select the connection and schema on the main panel and then select table you want to edit data from and click over Edit MySQL Data.

and just import the MySQL data into Excel:



You can edit data like you always did with the previous version.

To test the save and restore saved sessions functionality, first we need to save the workbook while at least one Edit session is opened and close the file.
Then reopen the workbook. Depending on your version of Excel is where the next steps are going to differ:

Excel 2013 extra step (first):

In Excel 2013 you first need to open the workbook with saved edit sessions, then click the MySQL for Excel Icon on the the Data menu (notice how in this version, every time you open or create a new file the MySQL for Excel panel is closed in the new window). Please note that if you work on Excel 2013 with several workbooks with open edit sessions each at the same time, you'll need to repeat this step each time you open one of them:

Following steps: 

In Excel 2010 or previous, you just need to make sure the MySQL for Excel panel is already open at this point, if its not, please do the previous step specified above (Excel 2013 extra step). For Excel 2010 or older versions you will only need to do this previous step once.  

When saved sessions are detected, you will be prompted what to do with those sessions, you can click Restore to continue working where you left off, click Discard to delete the saved sessions (All edit session information for this file will be deleted from your computer, so you will no longer be prompted the next time you open this same file) or click Nothing to continue without opening saved sessions (This will keep the saved edit sessions intact, to be prompted again about them the next time you open this workbook):

And there you have it, now you will be able to save your Edit sessions, close your workbook or turn off your computer and you will still be able to reopen them in the future, to continue working right where you were. Today we talked about how you can save your active Edit sessions and restore them later, this is another feature included in the latest MySQL for Excel release (1.2.0). Please remember you can try this product and many others for free downloading the installer directly from our MySQL Installer downloads page.

Happy editing !