Excel to Access - easy ways?

[Bloodrayne]

Hello all,

I've recently been working on an Excel Spreadsheet that has grown to rather huge proportions - and was wondering if there's any easy way to port the data from my Excel Spreadsheet into an Access database?

This is all just preliminary musings as I may not be asked to do such things, I currently don't have MS Office (any of it) installed on this computer, so can't have a poke around and see if the help files offer any guidance - so apologies if this is an easy question...

Many thanks for any responses

 

[JACKSON]

You can import an excel spreadsheet in access very easily by using the File, get external data, import menu, and choose file type .xls. , Browse to the excel file and select it. This will import data into an existing table or create a new table in access. You can also automate this import, or link to the spreadsheet, so that it updates the access table when you update the excel spreadsheet. However, to do this you spreadsheet needs to be very straightforward (i.e consistant rows and columns, rows being records and columns being fields). It doesn't sound from your description of your spreadsheet that that is the case.

 

[mresann]

Keep in mind a properly normalized database does NOT look like an Excel spreadsheet. Before you can import any data from the spreadsheet, you need to analyze what you will be doing with the data you manipulate, how the users will interact with the data, etc. In addition, you need to learn about "normalization". That contains the necessary steps to make sure you don't duplicate data such as business names, states, and other repetitive data one finds in a typical Excel worksheet.

In other words, many people think that just by importing a spreadsheet to Access they are upgrading, then they learn about all the steps necessary to ensure the database is sound. The best way to learn is to look through existing sample databases like Northwind, and learn the relationships between data. Once you do that, you will have a better idea of how to port your data from Excel to Access.