HOW-TO: Mac Excel 2008 and MySQL Connector 3.51

[Erik Neuenschwander]

I figure the number of Mac Office users that crunch data with Excel and MySQL is a pretty small pool, but I thought I'd explain a problem I just solved, in case it bites someone else.

If you can't get queries working in Office 2008, using the 3.51.23 Connector, here's the problem: Microsoft Query is still a PPC app, and Excel is Intel native, so--if you are running on an Intel Mac--they can't agree on the architecture of the ODBC driver to use. You need to build "fat" .so files by hand, because mysql.com doesn't offer them. (Fat means multi-architecture.) Here's how.

(One note: this assumes you already have a successful install of the ODBC connector that Office is willing to use, and then just get an error when you try to connect with it. As I recall, that set up was also a bit of a trick, on its own.)

Download both the Intel and PPC Connector packages from mysql.com, then unpax the Archive.pax.gz files of each into their own trees. After that's done, run the following on each of the .so files in the packages:

lipo /tmp/mysql_ppc/usr/local/lib/$f /tmp/mysql_intel/usr/local/lib/$f -output /tmp/fat/$f -create

(where $f is the .so file)

then

sudo cp /tmp/fat/*.so /usr/local/lib

That's it!

I know this is a pretty terse explanation of the solution, but I doubt more than 5 people will care about this, and I hope those 5 know their way around the OS X shell. I'll try to revisit this forum and answer questions if it turns out this is confusing, though. Good luck!

-N