This section details a selection of advanced features of the Microsoft Excel provider.

User Defined Views

The provider allows you to define virtual tables, called user defined views, whose contents are decided by a pre-configured query. These views are useful when you cannot directly control queries being issued to the drivers. See User Defined Views for an overview of creating and configuring custom views.

SSL Configuration

Use SSL Configuration to adjust how provider handles TLS/SSL certificate negotiations. You can choose from various certificate formats; see the SSLServerCert property under "Connection String Options" for more information.

Firewall and Proxy

Configure the provider for compliance with Firewall and Proxy, including Windows proxies and HTTP proxies. You can also set up tunnel connections.

Caching Data

Caching Data enables faster access to data and reduces the number of API calls, improving performance. The connector supports a simple caching model where multiple connections can also share the cache over time. When configuring the cache connection, you can specify automatic or explicit data caching.

Query Processing

The provider offloads as much of the SELECT statement processing as possible to Microsoft Excel and then processes the rest of the query in memory (client-side).

See Query Processing for more information.

Logging

See Logging for an overview of configuration settings that can be used to refine CData logging. For basic logging, you only need to set two connection properties, but there are numerous features that support more refined logging, where you can select subsets of information to be logged using the LogModules connection property.