You want to draw a chart, a pivot, or some Excel-related functions but you don’t have SharePoint Excel Services. How will you accomplish your goal? Don’t worry about a thing, because SharePoint has a function that will help you and it’s called the Export to Excel function. It doesn’t only export data to Excel but also maintains a link to the original data in a SharePoint list. This will allow you to refresh data in Excel whenever the data is changed in the SharePoint list, simply by using the Refresh option in Excel. In this article, I will show you how to export data from SharePoint to Excel by using the Export to Excel feature in SharePoint 2010.

Now, I will show you how to export data from SharePoint to Excel.

Step 1: On the left-hand side of the site, click the list name from which you want to export data.

Step 2: In the Ribbon, on the List tab, in the Connect & Export group, click the Export to Excel option.

Step 3: In the Save As dialog box, type a file name and click the Save button.

Once you have completed exporting data, open the saved query (.iqy) file in Microsoft Excel.  You will be presented with a dialog warning that “Data connections have been blocked.”  Click Enable.

Clicking Enable authorizes Excel to create a connection to SharePoint, opens the link, and shows the data from SharePoint in a workbook sheet, as shown below.  (Clicking the Disable button, however, would cause Excel to disconnect and not be able to show data from SharePoint in a workbook sheet.)

Note: Changed data in Excel has not been updated in the SharePoint list since this is a one-way connection to the data in the SharePoint list. Currently, the data is linked which means that whenever data in SharePoint is changed, the data can be refreshed in Excel again.

Questions? Contact us or check out our online documentation.