When would you use Microsoft access?

Answer 1

Microsoft Access is used when you want to make a database. For example if you wanted to make a list of all the people you know and their addresses.

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You might use it or an ordinary address-book but it's a hopelessly inefficient way, and a .dbs file is far larger than the .xls one for the same data-set. Excel is far better for a simple, single table like an address-book, a simple inventory, straightforward accounting (one of its original purposes), and for mathematical and graph-plotting work. (Though MS has inexcusably now vandalised its own Excel graph routines!)

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You would use Access when you need a database, which consists of two or more related and linked tables each holding a separate data set but with some relationship between sets. Access training gives a typical (but obviously fictitious) example, that of a grocery chain, with details of the food products in one table, manufacturers' addresses in another, branch staff names and locations in another, and so on.

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It allows you to enter, store and retrieve selectively an enormous amount of data in several tables, using very easy-to-use entry forms and report-requests - though actually writing the database to do that is fiendishly difficult - of all the MS programmes, Access is probably the least intuitive and by far the hardest to learn, and very unforgiving if you make some small error.

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Excel won't create linked tables or easy entry and retrieval forms - but as with anything else, you decide which is the better application for your purpose.