Integrating Excel and Access

Chapter 1. Introduction to Access/Excel Integration

Most business users understand Excel; its power and practically universal acceptance make it a key application to learn. While Excel is a powerful tool on its own, you can do a lot more with it when you add the power of a relational database. Whether you store your data in a simple Access database or link an Access database to your corporate data warehouse, you'll be able to do a lot of things more easily. A simple query combined with an Excel workbook can supply many of the benefits of expensive reporting packages using the tools you already have on your desktop.

Consider the following scenario. Your company stores sales information in a database, and each sales record carries an identifier that tells who sold the item. You also have a table of salespeople that tells what region they are in and who supervises them. Senior management wants to find out how each salesperson, sales manager, and region performs on a daily basis. Since they want to see the reports so frequently, it will be necessary to automate these reports as much as possible. This book will show you how to gather the information and build the reports, charts, and supporting details that are necessary to meet these business objectives.

If you consider the other uses of corporate data, you will begin to understand how useful these skills can be. Here is a short list of fairly common uses of data:

• Producing a monthly commission schedule

• Reporting sales by product, region, sales manager, or salesperson

• Doing financial reporting

• Producing invoices

• Performing analysis of data (average profit per sale, sales by month, etc.)

• Producing trend information to aid corporate planning

• Populating financial models and storing results

• Graphing financial and sales information

Building systems that can simplify and automate these tasks can make complex projects much simpler. Fortunately, you likely already have the tools you need to do this on your computer and just need to assemble the parts correctly.

Communications Between Excel and Access

There are several ways to exchange data between Access and Excel. Automation (formerly called OLE Automation) is a method of communication that gives you access to another application's objects . Using Automation, you can actually take control of the other application and send and retrieve data, set properties, run methods, and perform many other tasks. This book will explore in depth how automation can be used to allow integration between Access and Excel.

Tip

One of the original ways to communicate between Windows programs was dynamic data exchange (DDE) . While this can be useful, I do not recommend it between Office applications. It is sometimes necessary when you are communicating with a program that does not have a very useful object model. However, the object models for all of the programs in the Office suite allow you so much flexibility that I cannot imagine a situation when DDE would be preferable to Automation with VBA.

The other methods of communication treat Access or Excel simply as a data source and allow query access. This is accomplished through ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) or Data Access Objects (DAO). In addition to these programming methods, both Access and Excel offer data access methods from the standard user interface that work well for simple tasks.