Microsoft Office Access 2010 Basic

Many people begin to explore Access after first building a list in Excel. Excel is a great place to start a list, but as the list grows, it becomes harder to organize and keep updated. Moving the list to Access is usually the next logical step.

A database table is similar in structure to a worksheet, in that data is stored in rows and columns. As a result, it is usually easy to import a worksheet into a database table. The main difference between storing your data in a worksheet and storing it in a database is in how the data is organized. Simply importing your entire worksheet as a new table in a database will not solve the problems associated with organizing and updating your data, particularly if your worksheet contains redundant data. To solve those problems, you must split the spreadsheet data into separate tables, each one containing related data. For more information about how to arrange the data in your tables, see the article Database design basics. Access features the Table Analyzer Wizard, which can help you to complete this process. After importing your data into a table, the wizard helps you to split the table into separate tables, each of which contains data that is not duplicated in any of the other tables. The wizard also creates the necessary relationships between the tables.