Microsoft Excel has been used for many years by Party Plates to store and compile specific personnel data, but it does limit us when it comes to create a relation between the stored data. In reality, Excel is not a database, and its practicality is somewhat limited since Excel is a “flat file database” which means that the data inputted is stored in a single file in the form of rows and columns. There are no relationships or links between records and fields in Excel except for the table structure (Chung, 2013).
This is when Access becomes an interesting tool for Party Plates to convert our current data stored in Excel into a relational database. A relational database is able to use data stored in different tables and relate them together in order to easily find specific information. Access also has the advantage of sorting data based on any field and would easily allow Party Plates to generate reports that contain only specific fields from each table. Once we transfer our data to Access, we would be able to add more tables and link them, create queries, share and update between authorized users in the company, and create extensive reports and forms.
Microsoft’s Access is a database management tool that stores large volumes of information together. It has many benefits for the work environment. One benefit is that it is user friendly and training does not take an extensive amount of time. It allows you to sort, analyze, summarize and generate reports of the data quickly and efficiently (Microsoft, 2013). It can import data from other databases and programs which is beneficial for a company with several different programs. Large amounts of data can be integrated into the database without sacrificing performance. Access minimizes errors and inconsistencies by avoiding duplicated, missing, and bad data from the tables. The
