Part III: More-Advanced Access Techniques
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Functionality exclusive to exports
Access provides a number of special capabilities during exports. These special exports don’t result
in external data in the usual sense, but they make Access data accessible to external applications in
some important ways.These special export options arel Snapshot Viewer: Exports to the Microsoft Access Snapshot format (.snp). This is a spe-
cial, read-only format of an Access report, similar in concept to the Adobe PDF format.
l Merge it with Microsoft Word: Word documents can be produced as direct Access data-
base exports.Note
You can import from Word into Access by converting the Word document into a text file first. You could even
use Word in combination with Excel to produce a delimited text file.
l Microsoft Word Mail Merge: A specialized Word document export function is that of
Mail Merge using Word. In this case, you can create Word documents, for subsequent
printing.Summary
Access is unequaled in its ability to use data from many different sources. It imports and exports
most common data file formats used by businesses around the world. This chapter covered many,
but not all, of the import and export capabilities built into Micrsoft Access. These abilities, com-
bined with the linked tables and other techniques discussed in Chapter 16 provide incredibly
powerful options to Access developers.