Microsoft Access versus Excel: The Differences

Microsoft Access and Excel are two totally different programs. Access is a database program while Excel is for spreadsheets and financial calculations.

You would use Access to collect, manipulate and sort different types of data: names, addresses, titles, identifying codes, and so on. The primary use of Excel is to create financial spreadsheets. Excel has basic functions to sort data, but its primary use is performing financial calculations and manipulating numbers.

With Excel, you can compile financial data and manipulate it using a variety of built-in formulas. It's an extremely powerful spreadsheet program that can perform dozens of different computations, from basic mathematical operations such as addition or multiplication to more complex calculations such as averages and percentages.

You can create extremely complex financial "what if" scenarios where you change different variables and see what the consequences of those changes would be. I've used Excel this way in the real world and it's invaluable. For instance, you might see how changes in interest rates, wages, commodity costs, or some combination of factors affect the profitability of your business over a specific time period. What happens if interest rates rise but wages remain flat? Or if gas prices rise faster than other commodity costs? Excel makes it easy to change one or two variables and see how it affects the bottom line.

The software also has graphing capabilities and can produce pie charts, line graphs, and bar graphs. These features are great for translating your data into a visual form that's more quickly understood. Graphs make it easier to spot trends and are great for presentations.

Excel does have limited data sorting capabilities but you wouldn't want to try to create and maintain a complex database with it.

Microsoft Access can be used for any situation where you have a large amount of information and you want the ability to extract portions of the data according to specific criteria.

With Access, you can collect, sort and manipulate data such as words, phrases, names and numbers. For example, you could do a database of employees or members of a club, storing all their personal information: name, age, address, phone number, and so on. Then you could ask the program to give you a list of those individuals that fit a specific set of parameters: for example, employees with over ten years of service or employees in a certain department or city. (While you could store and sort this type of data in Excel, you couldn't easily extract portions of your data that meet certain criteria.)

Access also allows you to create and format custom reports using your data. Reports give you the ability to select and display different combinations of data in ways that are useful to you.

People who aren't familiar with database software will often try to store database information in a spreadsheet. While Excel can be used this way, it doesn't offer the full range of capabilities that Access does. You're much more limited in the ways you can search and return data, and you can't funnel selected portions of your data into customized reports the way you can with Access.

If you have a small amount of data and don't need complex search capabilities or custom reports, you can probably get by with Excel; otherwise, you'd do well to invest in a proper database program such as Microsoft Access.