If you are in a position that requires managing a lot of data for your company, you may be considering Microsoft Access training. Microsoft Access is a powerful tool for organizing and managing large tables of data, but many people use Excel for similar tasks instead. This article explores the reasons to use Access versus Excel for your data management projects, and will give some examples of the core strengths of each application.
Reasons to Use Microsoft Access
Access is generally suited for data and actions that are repeated, for example tracking orders and payments for your business. If you expect to have multiple instances of the same transaction, then it makes a lot of sense to organize this data using Access. Why? Consider this example: Let's say Customer A orders a lot of Blue Widgets from your company each month. If you were trying to track this in Excel, you would need to repeat all of Customer A's information in each order's record. With Access, Customer A's contact information can sit in a separate table so that all you need to enter in the orders database would be the customer's ID number. When it comes time to do your reporting, or look at sales by geographic region, etc., you can still use queries to include that information for Customer A without having to expressly put it into the orders table.
Access also allows you to maintain more control over the input process than Excel. If you have multiple users who enter the data into your system, you want to reduce or eliminate the chance for errors as much as possible. Access allows you to do this by designing a data entry form, which gives your users access to the fields you want them to have access to, but not to other parts of the database that could be broken by bad data entry.
Reasons to Use Microsoft Excel
Excel is of course a very powerful tool in its own right. If you manage a lot of financial data that requires a lot of computations and analysis, then Excel will likely be your tool of choice. Excel also allows much more robust modeling and predictions than Access, making it very useful for strategic decision making and budgeting for the future.
You may also find that many users in your company are not familiar or comfortable using Access, or that you need to distribute multiple templates of a file for many different users. In that case, Excel offers the most flexibility.
As you can see, it is important to know what your most important tasks will be when looking for computer training. Microsoft Access is an underutilized tool that you may find does a much better job at handling tasks that you have been using Excel for. On the other hand, Excel is appropriate for many data management tasks as well.
Reasons to Use Microsoft Access
Access is generally suited for data and actions that are repeated, for example tracking orders and payments for your business. If you expect to have multiple instances of the same transaction, then it makes a lot of sense to organize this data using Access. Why? Consider this example: Let's say Customer A orders a lot of Blue Widgets from your company each month. If you were trying to track this in Excel, you would need to repeat all of Customer A's information in each order's record. With Access, Customer A's contact information can sit in a separate table so that all you need to enter in the orders database would be the customer's ID number. When it comes time to do your reporting, or look at sales by geographic region, etc., you can still use queries to include that information for Customer A without having to expressly put it into the orders table.
Access also allows you to maintain more control over the input process than Excel. If you have multiple users who enter the data into your system, you want to reduce or eliminate the chance for errors as much as possible. Access allows you to do this by designing a data entry form, which gives your users access to the fields you want them to have access to, but not to other parts of the database that could be broken by bad data entry.
Reasons to Use Microsoft Excel
Excel is of course a very powerful tool in its own right. If you manage a lot of financial data that requires a lot of computations and analysis, then Excel will likely be your tool of choice. Excel also allows much more robust modeling and predictions than Access, making it very useful for strategic decision making and budgeting for the future.
You may also find that many users in your company are not familiar or comfortable using Access, or that you need to distribute multiple templates of a file for many different users. In that case, Excel offers the most flexibility.
As you can see, it is important to know what your most important tasks will be when looking for computer training. Microsoft Access is an underutilized tool that you may find does a much better job at handling tasks that you have been using Excel for. On the other hand, Excel is appropriate for many data management tasks as well.
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