Microsoft Access 2010 Bible

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CHAPTER

Working with

External Data

IN THIS CHAPTER

Looking at the types of

external data and methods

for working with them

Linking your Access database

to external data

Using linked tables

Linking to external data

sources with code

S

o far, you’ve worked with data in Access tables found within the cur-
rent database. In this chapter, you explore the use of data from other
types of files. You learn to work with data from database, spreadsheet,
HTML, and text-based files. After I describe the general relationship between
Access and external data, I explain the major methods of working with exter-
nal data: linking and importing/exporting.

On the CD-ROM
This chapter uses the Chapter16.accdb database as well as several other
files that you’ll use for linking. If you haven’t already copied these files onto
your machine from the CD, you’ll need to do so now.

Note that, because the point of this chapter is to show how Access works
with external data, there are examples of external data that you need to copy
to your machine. Unfortunately, when working with external data, Access
requires an exact path to each file — it can’t work with relative paths. That
means that when you copy Chapter16.accdb to your machine, it won’t
work until you relink the various external files. I show you how to do that in
this chapter. For now, be aware that the following tables are linked to the
files indicated: