What is Microsoft Access?

Microsoft Access or Microsoft Office Access is a database system made for

individuals and small-to-medium-sized businesses who want to capture, manage,

and report data in a professional way. It is a member of the Microsoft Office Suite

of applications which combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a

graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is known for being a

leading option for professional data managers who require advanced ways to report

project data. Since Microsoft Access does not require complicated programming,

regular people can create powerful data bases in advanced ways with Microsoft

Access.

What is the software access used for?

Microsoft Access is a DBMS (also known as Database Management System) from

Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a

graphical user interface and software-development tools.

What is the purpose of access?

Microsoft Access is designed to scale to support more data and users by linking to

multiple Access databases or using a back-end database like Microsoft SQL Server.

With the latter design, the amount of data and users can scale to enterprise-level

solutions.

What does easy access mean?

A means of approaching, entering, exiting, communicating with, or making use of:

a store with easy access. 2. The ability or right to approach, enter, exit, communicate

with, or make use of: has access to the restricted area; has access to classified

material. 3.

What is online access?

An online public access catalog (often abbreviated as OPAC or simply library

catalog) is an online database of materials held by a library or group of libraries.

Users search a library catalog principally to locate books and other material available

at a library.

What are the Microsoft Access advantages?

Easy to install and use — Access gives data managers a fully functional, relational

database management system in minutes. Like many other Microsoft applications,

Access contains Wizards that walk you through each step of the way. The user

interface is intuitive; accelerating data information retrieval.

Ease to integrate – Access works well with many of the developing software

programs based in Windows. It also can be used in the front-end as back-end tables

with products like Microsoft SQL Server and non-Microsoft products like Oracle

and Sybase.

.NET-friendly – Access is a go-to choice for users who plan to develop software

using .NET; linking to Access database. Its graphical user interface also offers easy

functionality and set up.

Widely popular — Microsoft Access is the most popular desktop database system in

the world.

Saves you money — Microsoft Access is hundreds of dollars more economical than

other larger systems; offering the same functions and usage.

Convenient storage capacity – A Microsoft Access database can hold up to 2 GB of

data.

Multi-user support – About ten users in a network can use an Access application.

Importing data — Microsoft Access makes it easy to import data.

What are the Microsoft Access disadvantages?

Finite – Microsoft Access is useful for individual departments or small-to-medium

business sectors. Any sector whose usage goes beyond 2 GB will hit a wall and

discover limitations.

Structure Query Language (SQL) — SQL for MS Access is not as robust as MS

SQL Server or Oracle, to just name a few.

One file — All the information from your database is saved into one file. This limits

options and how you choose utilize data; slowing down reports, queries, and forms.

Its performance becomes slow as the user scales data size. Multimedia data can use

up MS Access limited space quickly.

Static-Friendly — It’s difficult to publish files a part from static files.

Multi-user limited — Technical limit is 255 concurrent users, but real world limit is

10 to 80 (depending on type of application).

MS Access is a database management system that:

is less intuitive at the design stage,

but

- leaves a spreadsheet “in the dust" by joining related tables that can be maintained

and updated separately and joined for day-to-day business records, sub-forms and

powerful reports.

is slower in crunching numbers and does so far less transparently than a spreadsheet,

but

- can do useful calculations in a form or a report that you cannot get from a

spreadsheet.

is susceptible to disastrous and irreversible data destruction through instantly-

executed update and delete queries,

but

- gives the user a tremendously powerful data editing capability that can be preserved

for future use.