Chapter 4. Integration from the Access Interface

Using VBA from Access is very powerful and will be covered fully throughout the rest of the book. However, Access has some very powerful features available right from the user interface for importing, exporting, and linking data with Excel. The ability to do this from the Access user interface makes many tasks easier. For example, suppose you have two Excel spreadsheets of customer data, and you want to know which customers are on one sheet but missing from the other. You could try to use Excel's VLOOKUP functions and possibly even write some code in Excel to search the other worksheet. From Access, though, you can simply link the two worksheets and run the Find Unmatched Query Wizard; this technique will be discussed later in the chapter.

There are many other easy-to-use features covered in this chapter. By the end of this chapter, you will know how to do the following things:

• Import data from Excel into a new or existing table

• Link an Excel worksheet or named range and treat it like a table in Access

• Export an Access table to be analyzed with Excel

• Use the Save As feature to export a table or query

• Save a report in an Excel format

Performing these tasks requires only a few mouse clicks. After using these features, you'll begin to see other possibilities for integrating these applications. Also, you can use Access to perform these tasks on DBF files, fixed-width text files, delimited text files, and ODBC data source tables. Our examples, however, will be focused on Excel.