The following recipe works with Microsoft Excel 2003

To create a new query

Select in the menu (with a document open!):
Data / Import External Data / New Database Query...

- Select "AR System ODBC Data Source" in the "Choose Data Source" dialog
(Microsoft Query will be used to compose the query, the following
description assumes that the opetion "Use the Query Wizard to
create/edit queries" is selected) [OK]

- write server name (sunar01), username, password

- Query Wizard - Choose Columns
(select the fields that you want to display or that you to select the entries to import)
For example, select columns: CaseID, Short Description, Category
from table PRMS:ProblemMgmt [NEXT]

- Query Wizard - Filter Data
(select a subset of the tickets to display
only the columns selected before can be used for the qualification
note that the values to match cannot be selected using the menus)
Select the field(s) you want to filter on in the Column to filter: list
and write the qualification(s) for that field in the Include only rows where: box,
for example, Category equals Remedy Support [NEXT]

- Query Wizard - Sort Order
(left empty for this example) [NEXT]

- Query Wizard - Finish
Save... "remedy support.dqy" [SAVE]
Return Data to Microsoft Office Excel [FINISH]

Back in EXCEL, select where to put the retrieved data

To execute a saved query

Select in the menu (with a document open!):
Data / Import External Data / Import Data...

The query saved before will appear in the list of available data sources

Notes:

- don't include all the columns! That might result in Microsoft Query error:
"Expected lexical element not found: FROM"

- be careful to avoid an unqualified search. If no filter is
used, severl thousands of tickets will be retrieved.

- the names of some fields are different that the ones that appear in
the User Tool (v.g. Short Description here corresponds to the Summary
in the User Tool), and a lot of fields which are normally hidden can
be selected (just ignore them)

- if you want to filter data using a time criteria, write the date in YYYY-MM-DD format