All I know is that it’s a “database management system”, and I don’t even know what that means! I have tried fooling around with Access and have gotten nowhere. Where do I start and what is the purpose of this?
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At the core, EXCEL is just making lists.
ACCESS is for building collections of lists, and relating the contents of those lists to each other.
Let’s say you are hungry, and open the door to your refrigerator to see what is available for a quick snack. You see some cheeses, and milk, juice, bottled water, etc. There’s leftover Pad Thai, and maybe some old meatloaf.
You close the door, still hungry, but now you have a good idea of what is inside the fridge, right?
That’s EXCEL. It’s a spreadsheet, that let’s you make simple lists. The lists can tell you the kinds of things you have available to eat, and how many, and all manner of things ABOUT the stuff in the fridge. It will always show you what you have inside, assuming you update the lists.
Now, let’s imagine that you are on a diet. You need to have a certain amount of calories, and only from certain food groups. Maybe you are lactose intolerant, or need gluten-free meals.
Glancing in the fridge, (EXCEL), you could find the ingredients for dinner, right? But, you would have to sort and organize (FILTER) the stuff, grouping it and trying to make the best out of what you have.
But, what if you had a bunch of pre-packaged meals in there? All of the correct ingredients, organized by your requirements, and also automatically re-ordered when you run low? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just reach in and grab a Mexican meal? Or an Italian one?
That’s the power of ACCESS. ACCESS is a relational database, that means it creates connections between the objects it contains. So, your Italian meal may have cheese, tomato sauce, ground beef, and spices. There are a lot of similar items that can be combined or substituted for any of those, but because you may be lactose intolerant, you maybe use tofu instead. ACCESS would automatically update all your recipes that use cheese and substitute tofu.
Sure, you can do a FIND/REPLACE of your recipe ingredients in EXCEL. But, with ACCESS, you can store variations of those recipes, changing only the ones that matter.
A good way to think of ACCESS is to go to a website to buy a car. You enter YEAR, MAKE, and MODEL, and some pricing information, then click a button and there are all those cars you can afford. That’s relational database at work there…
You can then make a list of all the cars in your area, and print it out as a table. That’s EXCEL.
True, ACCESS can also do that. But, the main difference is that EXCEL does database stuff with a lot of extra steps. ACCESS does EXCEL spreadsheets exports with the click of a button.
ACCESS is EXCEL on steroids, and then some. It is, as someone mentioned, based on the idea of the Structured Programming Language (SQL). You can create a stripped-down version of a sophisticated database in ACCESS, and then upscale it to ‘real’ SQL.
You can’t do that with EXCEL. At best, you can create worksheets that mimic the table information and schema (the structure and relationships between fields and how they are connected). You can use EXCEL to do a LOT of things, using VBA or other coding techniques.
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