Chapter 33: Integrating Access with SharePoint ........................................................................
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data. SharePoint services can be both local to a specific company, and even rented or leased from
service providers. The data input into an Access application on a user’s desktop is available to all
SharePoint users. Similarly, when a user opens an Access report, at least a portion of the data may
be hosted on a SharePoint site many thousands of miles away.Note
You can find a commercial site, or perhaps even a free demonstration service, to experiment with. This book
uses a Microsoft beta SharePoint 2010 Web site, which will not be available by the time you read this book.
However, all of the capabilities described in this chapter (and the other chapters in Part V of this book) are
available to anyone with access to SharePoint Server 2010.
Sharing Access Data with SharePoint
Building Access interfaces with SharePoint simply means going into an Access application, linking
to SharePoint lists, and then writing forms and reports based on those linked tables. A linked
SharePoint lists appears (to Access) as any other linked data source as described in Chapter 16 and
other places throughout this book.In addition, Access 2010 enables you to import SharePoint data directly into local Access tables.
Although imported data is no longer connected to the SharePoint site, and is therefore “stale” com-
pared to data remaining on the site, a snapshot of data from a SharePoint site may be useful in
some situations.Linking to SharePoint lists
The most fundamental data sharing between Access and SharePoint is for Access to link to a
SharePoint list and use the data as with any other linked data source. The only difference is that
because SharePoint does not support a wide variety of data types, the linked SharePoint lists are
somewhat less flexible than links to, for instance, SQL Server tables.Linking to a SharePoint list is much like linking to any other data source. Click the More drop-
down button in the Import & Link group on the External Data tab to reveal the list of more
advanced import and linking options (see Figure 33.1).Select SharePoint List from the list of import and linking options, and Access opens the Get
External Data – SharePoint Site dialog box (see Figure 33.2). The top portion of this dialog box
shows a list of recently-visited SharePoint sites, and just below this list is a text box for entering the
destination SharePoint site’s URL. As you may recall from Chapter 32, a SharePoint site is accessi-
ble through a URL, and actually resides on a Web server, most often located on a LAN.