Thanks for the replies Debbie.
I was going to go thru it again to make sure I got the exact steps but here instead is my recollection of what I've made work in the last couple days since I posted this forum question.
what didn't work:
1) open a .csv in excel and SAVE AS .xls file
2) select the columns and create an excel table (in that same .xls file). save the file again.
3) go into TDP connection manager under Microsoft excel connections.....and add or change it to see my new .xls file.
4) (even though I have the base edition) I was able to ALT-C to open new cross connection qry editor in TDP query builder.
5) anything I tried there, errored becuase of the 'type in excel' was unrecognizable (sorry didnt get screen shot of error)
what did work:
instead of doing a SAVE AS, I created a new .xls sheet and then copied & pasted into the new sheet from the orig CSV file in excel.
then I did the same for steps 2,3,4 above and THEN I was able to 'see' the excel table on the TDP left side and then drag and drop that table into the ALT-C editor to finally do a SQL select.
that worked great, speedy, etc.
NEXT I did the same on the DB2 tables and also could quickly get SQL select results.
I tried to select from the same XLS file and INNER JOIN the DB2 table to it. I found that it was DEALTHLY Slow. my original csv file had <600 rows in it and the DB2 table had 180K rows. at first I thought it wasn't working. Then I shrunk the XLS table........when I removed all rows except 2 rows. THEN I finally got an inner join to work, but it took 34 seconds. I realize that this could be related to our network being tightly locked down, but I don't see the TDP slowness on either the XLS selects or the DB2 selects....only when there's a JOIN there.
is there some default TDP setting that I can adjust so this cross connection editor might not be so slow?
thanks for your (patience on my slow reply and for your) help.
Kevin