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What Is Access Good For, Anyway?

What is Access good for? That’s a good question. Well, the list of what you can do with it is a lot longer than the list of what you can’t do with it — of course, especially if you leave things like “wash your car” and “put away the dishes” off the “can’t do” list. When it comes to data organization, storage, and retrieval, Access is at the head of the class.

Building big databases


Okay, what do I mean by big database? Any database with a lot of records — and by a lot, I mean hundreds. At least. And certainly if you have thousands of records, you need a tool like Access to manage them. Although you can use Microsoft Excel to store lists of records, it limits how many you can store (no more than the number of rows in a single worksheet). In addition, you can’t use Excel to set up anything beyond a simple list that can be sorted and filtered. So anything with a lot of records and complex data is best done in Access.

Some reasons why Access handles big databases well:

  • Typically, a big database has big data-entry needs. Access offers not only forms but also features that can create a quick form through which someone can enter all those records. This can make data entry easier and faster and can reduce the margin of error significantly. (Check out Chapter 7 for more about building forms.)
  • When you have lots and lots of records, you also have lots of opportunities for errors to creep — duplicate records, records with misspellings, records with missing information — and that’s just for openers. So you need an application such as Access to ferret out those errors and fix them. (Chapter 9 lays out how you can use Access to find and replace errors and search for duplicate entries.)
  • Big databases mean big needs for accurate, insightful reporting. Access has powerful reporting tools you can use to create printed and onscreen reports — and those can include as few or as many pieces of your data as you need, drawn from more than one table if need be. You can tailor your reports to your audience, from what’s shown on the reports pages to the colors and fonts used.
  • Big databases are hard to wade through when you want to find something. Access provides several tools for sorting, searching, and creating your own specialized tools (known as queries) for finding the elusive single record or group of records you need.
  • Access saves time by giving you new uses for existing tools you may have used to import data from other sources — such as Excel worksheets (if you started in Excel and maxed out its usefulness as a datastorage device) and Word tables. This saves you from reentering all your data and allows you to keep multiple data sources consistent.

Building apps

There are several ways to build apps — a term that’s come to mean an application that runs on a smartphone or other hand-held device — but that also applies to SharePoint, with Access 2013.

You can build an app using the Access 2013 Web App template or build a custom web app, starting from scratch. You can also download an app from the Office Store and then customize it. You can also build a standard database, just like you always have in Access, and publish that via the web.

Now, that said, this is not a book about apps or building them. The goal of this book is to show you how to use Access to build databases for use on a computer (a desktop or laptop/notebook). If you need to create a database app for use on a smartphone or tablet, you can check out any of the following publications or explore instructions available online by Googling How do I create a database app with Access 2013?.

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