San José State University Department of Economics & Tornado
Alley Microsoft Access is a convenient database package. It has
templates for creating personal databases for books, recipes,
etc. These templates are accessed by the Database Wizard which
can be opened from the initial screen. The more specialized
databases are created using It is important to note that a
database file must be created at the beginning because the
database tables containing the information for the database can
only be stored in such database files, which have the extention
.mdb. Otherwise, you may find that you enter the data in a table
but because you have no .mdb file to store it in it will be
lost. It is probably most efficient to enter the data into an
Excel file and then import that file into Access. One reason
that it is more convenient to work through Excel is that
arithmetic manipulations such as computing ratios are easily
done in Excel but only done with difficulty or not at all in
Access. There is at least one feature that