I think there may be a firewall problem or missing piece of information (like an ip) or incorrect connection string that is preventing you from connecting to the hosted mysql. You might at some point verify with your hosting provider that this is even allowed for your account.

Here's this myodbc thing that seems like it may do what you ask http://www.automateexcel.com/2005/11/01/connect_excel_to_mysql_database/ but I don't think you necessarily need another tool (see previous paragraph)

But I have three questions:

1. First, have you verified that you will be able to connect using ANY application (such as Mysql administrator or the mysql command line) to your hosted mysql database server? You would need the hostname or ip, port, username and password. This may be an option on your account you have to set or it may not be allowed at all. Depends on your host and the type of account.

From reading your question and this stuff in your reply

"Also, this is about simultaneous multi-user lookup of data during a transaction, so the CSV route is not feasible. I'm considering Access, but need to do very heavy computations, thus I need Excel"

2. Now I'm curious, what are you actually doing? Usually when it gets that involved the spreadsheet doesn't handle it alone well and one starts developing an application rather than trying to make Excel do everything. In that case the calculations might be in Java or C++ or Python or whatever and the application would access the DB through standard APIs. OR another common scenario is to have a layer of application code around your mysql database that this financial application might call through a web API.

But.. maybe what you are trying to do makes sense and will actually work if you can connect. Just doesn't seem the standard approach. Although I don't have any details.

3. What sort of transactions? Are they actually financial transactions??
Source(s):
http://www.automateexcel.com/2005/11/01/connect_excel_to_mysql_database/


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