Microsoft Excel and Access are data analysis tools but differ in some criteria. Excel mainly deal with spreadsheets complex numerical data, creating charts and Access deal with database program by collecting, sorting and manipulating data. Both Microsoft software’s manipulate data and have better functions depending on what each user wants to achieve.
COMPARISON
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- Excel is best for analyzing in depth complex numerical data with formulas (SUMIF, average, count, max and min). Access queries can be used to summarize data and present aggregate values, such as sums, averages, and counts.
- Excel helps in performing sophisticated what-if analysis operations on your data, such as statistical, engineering, and regression analysis, Access does not.
- You can view Charts, Graphs, tables, VLOOKUP, PivotTable reports in Excel and view queries, tables, forms and reports in Microsoft Access.
- Excel provides more advanced PivotTable reporting and charting features than Access.
- Excel do not need any programming knowledge as to Access that need programming knowledge for some part.
- Excel provides just a read-only connection to SharePoint lists, but Access lets you read from and write data to SharePoint lists.
- Excel provides only one way to collaborate with multiple users on a SharePoint Services site and Access provides a variety of ways to collaborate with multiple users on a SharePoint site.
- Both Excel and Access have options for removing duplicate values in a spreadsheet/table.
- Excel is best for worksheet non- relational data (data usually contained in worksheets are also known as flat files). Access is better for managing data: helping you keep it organized, easy to search, and available to multiple simultaneous users.
- Excel and Access can pull data from each other and various external sources including from web, Microsoft SQL server and analysis services, text files, XML files, ODBC and OLE DB data sources.
- Microsoft Excel is mainly used for flat files and non-relational databases while Access is best for storing relational database. A relational database is a type of data organized into multiple tables where each table is considered flat with only one type of data. For example, if a hospital database is created with names of patients stored in one table, whereas patient’s names and treatments are stored in separate tables.
- Excel supports user-level security features, Access does not but support the user security model of any database server that it connects to.
- They both have the ability compare tables and filter records.
- While Excel does not use SQL to view data, Access has variety of ways to view data. Access lets you use Structured Query Language (SQL) queries to quickly retrieve just the rows and columns of data contained in one table or many tables.
- Excel does not allow multiple users edit a record at the same time, Access lets multiple users open a single database at the same time; thereby allowing users the ability to edit different records without conflict.
- Excel does not have same storage capacity as compared to Access. Meaning Access can store more data than Excel.
Conclusively, Microsoft Excel and Access are great tools for data mining and exploration of both structured and unstructured data, which has earned a top spot amongst tools used by analysts.
