You have discovered that Microsoft Excel is an excellent tool to store data and

Question

You have discovered that Microsoft Excel is an excellent tool to store data and play around with it as needed. But your supervisor found out that not everybody is as comfortable in inputting data and generating queries or reports as you. Therefore, he has decided to use another tool called Microsoft Access and train them on the same. You have also been asked to attend the training and gain knowledge about Microsoft Access.

At the end of the week-long training, your manager asks you the following questions:

What kinds of tasks is Microsoft Access best suited for?

Did you face any difficulties while creating a database?

How would you overcome these difficulties?

What in your opinion is the most significant reason for integrating Microsoft Access with other sources of data? Give reasons and examples to support your answer.

How can you integrate your Microsoft Excel data with Microsoft Access and vice versa? Be sure to try this and share your experience.

How comfortable were you with integrating your Microsoft Excel data with Microsoft Access and vice versa? Suggest ways in which your comfort level with integrating Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access can be enhanced.

How can the functionality of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access be improved? How would your proposed changes help Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access users? Give reasons to support your answer.

Explanation / Answer

Choosing Between Spreadsheets and Databases

We are often asked by Microsoft Office power users whether, why, and when they should use Microsoft Access versus Microsoft Excel. Especially when they are very comfortable using MS Excel and don't understand the reasons why anyone would use MS Access or databases. Here's our perspective.

Empowering Information Workers

We do not believe it's an either/or situation. Our experience with Access and Excel is that they both have strengths and naturally complement each other. Individuals who understand the differences, learn the products, and apply the appropriate tool for the appropriate situation give themselves and their organizations a competitive advantage.

Microsoft Office products empower individuals (Microsoft calls you Information Workers) to get things done on your own. This lets you leverage your knowledge of the work that actually needs to be done to your solution. This is far more efficient than forcing you to escalate problems to "IT professionals" who need help understanding your technical requirements with limited understanding of your business requirements. It becomes nearly impossible to do when one doesn't know the solution yet and is trying and modifying many things.

Advantages of Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets

The learning curve for Excel is very short, so it's easy to use Excel and be productive right away. Rare are the situations where IT staff create spreadsheets Information Workers can do for themselves.

Excel makes it easy to store data, perform numerical calculations, format cells, and adjust layouts to generate the output and reports to share with others. Advanced features such as subtotals, power pivot tables and pivot charts, analysis toolkit, and many templates make it easy to accomplish a wide range of tasks. It can even integrate with the Analytic Services (Business Intelligence) from SQL Server. Tweaking the results is also very easy to get the exact layout, fonts, colors, etc. that you want.

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