Chapter 9: External Data

Overview

The main reason for owning a database is obviously to store data. So far, you've seen a lot about manipulating data within Access using VBA. But in business, you'll often have data in a variety of formats: text files, spreadsheets, and so on. When you're designing new business applications in Access you might need a way to get this data into and out of Access, so that you can incorporate it into your application.

Access has a very good wizard for importing data, but you might want data imports to be something that users can run, and you probably don't want them to have the ( potentially dangerous) freedom of running the wizard. So what we're going to cover in this chapter is how to bypass that wizard (however nice it might be), and move data in and out of Access with code. That way it's you who are in control of the import and export process, and not the user .

In particular we shall be looking at:

• Importing and exporting data to other applications

• Importing and exporting data to text files, both in a fixed format, and a CSV (Comma Separated Values) format

• Importing and exporting data to XML and using XML to generate Web Reports

• Sending data via electronic mail

• Using data that is stored in other databases