Customer Reviews

Integrating Excel and Access

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The book does a pretty good job covering the various techniques of data exchange between two applications. Usually in an Access-only or Excel-only reference, there would be a chapter spent on this topic max. However, one of my surprises after spending some time with the book is how often VBA is used in example after example. I think a more appropriate title or at least subtitle would have VBA in it. That is why I gave it 4 stars instead of 5.

I think you have to be at least an intermediate level user with both Excel and Access to even understand why you'd want to use these two applications together, and I think at least an intermediate comfortability with VBA is warranted. One of the first VBA examples of the book is where the author creates a reusable module for creating an ADO connection... great example, it sets a tone for the reader's comfortability with VBA.

The author also includes some examples of using Excel/Access data with other applications, including Word, SQL Server, and MapPoint (which might be a bit of a stretch).

Overall, it's a good book because it forays into a topic with very minimal coverage and succeeds by providing solid examples across a wide range of situations. You'd be hard pressed to use every chapter in the book due to the wide coverage, but I certainly had no problems diving into a chapter and immediately finding applicability to my related business problems.

This book contains a hodgepodge of topics loosely fitting in with Access and Excel. Unfortunately, the title is misleading. You would expect an entire book on automating data movement between Excel and Access (BOTH from AND to), but you don't entirely get that. The XML stuff and integration with other applications is interesting but not necessarily relevant. There's also a great discussion of Excel's R1C1 (relative address) and A1 (absolute address) style notation.

Let's go through the chapters:
1. Intro
2. Using Excel's Uset Interface
3. Data Access from Excel VBA (using Excel to pull data in)
4. Integration from the Access Interface which covers exporting data to Excel.
5. Using Access VBA to Automate Excel (about pushing/exporting a spreadsheet from Access to an Excel window using Access VBA)
6. Using Excel Charts and Pivot Tables with Access Data
7. Leveraging SQL Server Data with Microsoft Office... part of this talks about how Excel can AVOID Access (the opposite of what the book is supposed to be about!)
8. Advanced Excel Reporting Techinques... bad title, good topic. This is about using Access VBA to create reports in an Excel spreadsheet.
9. Using Access and Excel Data in Other Applications (OTHER??? applications. Now we are looking at OTHER applications like Word, Powerpoint, and MapPoint. Interesting, but way off topic.)
10. Creating Form Functinality in Excel (another chapter about Excel, not integration)
11. Builing Graphical User Interfaces (an unnecessary Access tutorial)
12. Tackling an Integration Project (general discussion)

Then there's an appendix about Excel('s) Object Model and VBA Basics.

So out of all of the above, all it has to say about importing Excel data into Access is many pages showing how to use the import wizard which is pretty intuitive anyway but doesn't say much about pulling Excel data into Access using VBA. What about getting DoCmd.TransferSpreadsheet to work as smart as manually using the Access import wizard?

I have spent the past ten years making my living developing integrated & automated financial systems using Excel, Access, and VBA for accounting and finance departments. That said, I literally have dozens of Excel, Access, and VBA books on my bookshelf. This is the only book that I have ever seen that integrates Excel and Access. It of course uses VBA to accomplish much of this.

Why it has taken so long for someone to put the pieces together in one book I am not sure. What I am sure of is how useful this book is. If you use Excel and Access this book is a must. This should be your primary reference for integrating and automating Excel and Access. You will learn better ways to do what you are already doing. You will also learn ways to do things that you never knew were possible. As a result, your applications will be more efficient, more powerful, more accurate, more reliable, and finally, you will be a better programmer/developer.

My work as a consultant puts me in a position to help others learn new ways to use Excel, Access, and VBA on a daily basis. When I show users what is possible, things that are covered in this book, they are not only impressed, they are amazed. They now do things that they never dreamed possible.

Integrating the two object models using VBA allows you to fully automate your applications/models. You can now do it minutes, if not seconds, what used to take you hours or days. You remove the possibility of the user making errors because the user is no longer manually manipulating the data (copying, pasting, etc.) You are not changing formulas, expressions, or criteria. You are allowing the computer to do all of that for you. This book, combined with advanced VBA makes true automation possible.

Even if you only desire to be an intermediate user, this book will make using Excel data in Access so much easier. It will of course also make it easier for you to get data from Access into Excel, and I am not talking about copying the results from a select query into an Excel worksheet. I am talking about using either the ODBC connection, or using SQL in VBA, to filter the data coming out of Access into Excel. As such, you get only the records that you want, with the click of a button.

In a nutshell, this book is a must for anyone that uses Excel and Access for a common task. I have read thru this book twice already, and it is my number one reference book. Once you open this book, you too will be asking, why it has taken so long for someone to put using the two programs together in one book.

Christopher T. Fennell
Microsoft Office Application Developer

I'd actually rate this 3.75 *'s, but that's not available. I find this excellent in the material it does cover, namely "controlling," if you will, Access from Excel. There simply are an insufficient number of books and documents covering the details of Microsoft automation, which was supposed to be one of hallmarks of using MS Office. However, I found nothing in the text going the other way - controlling Excel from Access. This is an inexcusable ommission, in my opinion. The book should be retitled so it's true content is clear.

The title of this book is misleading. 70% of the book covers Excel and how to make Excel integrate into other platforms and applications. At 190 pages, that means the author spends about 60 pages covering Access (and that's only to cover intuitive tasks accomplished through the user interface). The examples are mostly Excel VBA code; none of which are particularly new or mind blowing.

The strangest part of this book is the author inexplicably puts a half-hearted Excel object model in an Appendix. But no object model for Access? Can anyone say filler? Seems a shame to waste such an interesting topic on this extremely wordy collection of Excel code. The positive: this book is thin enough to fit perfectly under my wobbly desk.

I code in Access VBA but need to push data to excel spreadsheets and format the results. This book has the answers.
Would have gotten 5 stars but I didn't find a single reference to the Access TransferSpreadsheet function which pushes data to Excel Named ranges.

I bought this book because I was in a crunch and needed some quick help in getting a model I was building in Excel for a client to talk to the large dataset stored in Access (to run queries through VBA from the Excel platform, etc). It turns out that there's very little about using Excel as the front end and Access as the back end - the author favors using Access up front (including to do some seemingly random and senseless things as update an Excel model through a code you have to execute in Access, for some reason).

Beyond this flaw, my general impression of the book is a bunch of random snippets of code that were useful at some point to the author and which he reproduces with no attempt to actually explain the workings of the code. He then threw this in with a bunch of other stuff that you don't need a book to tell you how to do (import data from Access to Excel, import data to Access, etc.). There was little thought and quality put into this book - it shouldn't have been published.

I have quite a bit of experience with Excel and I am new to using Access. Right now, I am writing tools for business use and some personal use and this book has helped me a lot. It has also shown easier methods to build tools than some of what I have done in the past.
It is perfectly matched to what I needed for a current tool I am writing.
I definitely recommend this book for beginners and intermediates also if you have significant experience you may not find it helpful.

It used to be that you would get one book on Excel and another on Access and it would be up to you to bridge the gap. This book changes that. It takes a very common requirement, getting Access and Excel to work together, and gives a bunch of different techniques to solve that problem. And for that topic, and for that audience, the book is great. The writing is solid. The use of screenshots is sparing, which is nice. And the code is good.

I would like to congratulate the author Michael Schmalz on writing a book that is actually beneficial to a great number of Office users who have to manually integrate data between programs. In the book's preface, Mr Schmalz explains his experience and how he came to write this book. If you are like me, you often read an Access book and find that many authors write based upon theory not practice and only serves to whet my curiosity. I then ponder the question I know this can be done, but how?
In any event, I am sure that everyone who reads this book will find helpful information and ideas in all twelve chapters. At this time, you can sample chapter three in .pdf format available at: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/integratingea/index.html