4.6. Next Steps

This chapter covered some very basic functionality that exists in Access to deal with outside data sources, including Excel. Most of the functionality can be applied to other data sources as well. While these features can be very useful, I would guess that after you finish this book you'll use the more advanced functionality of Access VBA for most of your reporting tasks. The features covered in this chapter, therefore, will be used on a more ad hoc basis. Having said that, it is critical to understand how these features work because over time you will probably use each of them.

The other important item to note is that Access and Excel have very similar functionality with respect to data access. Because of that, people often use the feature that they know instead of the feature that will best solve the problem. It is because of those times that I think you should understand all of the features so you can make the best decision.

Finally, most of the features covered in this chapter can be automated by using Access VBA. This will be more relevant in future chapters, but if you have 20 or 30 Excel files to process, you would do yourself a big favor by learning a small amount of VBA to automate the process instead of doing each file individually.