I recently had a need to import a bunch of data into MySQL, and for reasons I won’t get into here, LOAD DATA INFILE wasn’t working for me.  I was in a hurry to get the data into MySQL so that I could filter it, and didn’t have time to work through my LOAD DATA INFILE issues.  Looking around for another way to quickly get my tab-delimited data into MySQL quickly, I decided to use the MySQL for Excel plugin.  If you haven’t seen this yet, and you have Excel, it might be worth your while.

In my case, I was able to quickly copy and paste the tab-delimited text file into an Excel spreadsheet, connect MySQL for Excel to the MySQL database and append the data to the existing table.  You’ll need to have Excel, MySQL and the MySQL for Excel plugin.  The latter

Windows users of MySQL may find something missing when they first download MySQL 5.6.6.  The .MSI package of MySQL for Windows has been eliminated in favor of the MySQL Installer for Windows.  You can still download MySQL in .ZIP format (as well as a source code .ZIP for the GPL-licensed Community edition), but the quickest way to get running MySQL on Windows is the MySQL Installer.  You can download the version of MySQL Installer that includes MySQL 5.6.6 on dev.mysql.com.

The MySQL Installer has a number of improvements over the old .MSI installer and configuration wizard.  Running the 5.6.6 installer on my machine, it detected that ports 3306 and 3307 were already used by other MySQL installations, and suggested port 3308 for the new installation.  It also recognized conflicts