Part III: More-Advanced Access Techniques
608
Summary
Linking to external data sources is an essential requirement for many Access applications.
Microsoft Access is equipped to deal with virtually any type of external data, including obsolete
database types such as dBASE, as well as more modern data types like HTML and XML.With few exceptions, linking to virtually any external data source requires very few steps on the
part of a developer. The Access linking wizards are very similar, regardless of the data type
involved in the link operation. The code required to automatically link to external data sources is
not extensive and is easily incorporated into Access applications. Access also provides tools such as
the Linked Table Wizard to help you manage linked tables in your applications.Chapter 17 deals with the important topic of importing data into Access applications. Although the
process is very similar to linking to external data sources, importing permanently copies the data
into an Access database. As you’ll see in Chapter 17, virtually the same steps are required to import
data as were required to link to external data.