Microsoft Excel & Access Integration: With Office 2007

I found this book to be a great resource. It's perfect for an Excel user who wants to start using the power of Access, Queries, and VBA to take their data analysis to the next level. I highly recommend this book. It was well worth the money.

This book is terrific. It is for the intermediate Excel user. It spring boards you into the world of MS Query! MS Query provides your spreadsheets excellent real time information from your MS Access database. The book states there is web material to work through the exercises. It was a bit difficult to find the materials on wiley.com. Go to h[...] There are two files with the description of "Sample Files", but they are really the materials for the book.

The back cover of this book starts out saying: 'Excel users. Access users. You're probably among the majority, living in one camp or the other but rarely crossing between the two.' That's a pretty good description of me. I have used Access for many years. I speak Access SQL, I know about Access input forms and output reports. I have seen Excel users who do much better looking presentations, have powerful tools to summarize and analyze data (such as charts), but I had no idea how to take information from an Access table and feed it into Excel. I started in this book with Chapter 5 - Getting Access Data into Excel. There are several different ways to get the data from simple drag and drop to using SQL for more powerful approaches. The examples use the new 'Ribbon' from Excel 2007, but many of the same features were in previous versions. The short section on SQL is elementary, if you really want to use SQL, you'll want a specialized book on Access SQL (note Access SQL - it's different than other SQLs). If you want to go the other direction, Chapter 1 is 'Getting Excel Data into Access.' The first half of the book is on using Excel and Access in their traditional ways, the second half gets more advanced with chapters on VBA, Automation, XML and with integrating Excel with other Office applications including Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. I'd rate this an intermediate level book. It's really intended for the Excel or Access user to teach them about the other package.

I'm an intermediate user with some experience using both Excel and Access. I've always hacked my way into integration, and have always had the sense that there are better ways to make Excel and Access work together. It turns out I was right. Within 30 minutes of receiving this book, I've found three techniques that have exponentially improved my processes. I particularly appreciate the fact that the authors start simple and build gradually to more complicated techniques. Five stars for this extremely valuable addition to my library!

Excellent resource, especially for the more experienced Excel user who wants to learn Access. Lot's of tangible, real-world examples.