There are many ways that you can get data from Excel to Access. By far, the easiest way is to cut and paste.

Let's say you have the following data in Excel that you would like to get into Access.

Getting the data to Access is simple. In Excel, highlight and copy all the cells with the data, including the two column headers.

Open the Access database where you want to insert the Excel data. In the navigation pane, click Tables and Related Views. Right-click any place within the navigation pane and then choose Paste. You will be greeted with the following prompt:

If your first row contains column headers as I suggested, you will, of course, click yes. Otherwise, click no. Note that, if you click no, your field names will be F1, F2, F3, etc., which is not terribly helpful. Hence my advice to make sure that you include the first row from Excel, which would contain your column headers.

At that point, unless something unusual happens you'll get the following message:

A new table will have been created at this point with the same name as the tab from Excel that you copied the data from. If you had not bothered to change the tab name in Excel, your table name will be called Sheet1 or something on that order. At this point simply open the newly created table and you will see something like the following:

Note that, as expected, the column names carried over from Excel.

Although there are many other ways you can get Excel data into Access, this is hands-down the easiest. In future Wizards, we will look into some of the alternative methods, which are perhaps more challenging, but also bring more power into the process.

There are many ways to get data from Access to Excel. By far the easiest is to simply cut and paste. Open the table or query that contains your data, click on the upper left-hand corner of your data grid (the small square gray box) and do a control C or Edit | Copy.

This will put your data onto the clipboard. From here, it's about as simple as you can imagine. Just open your Excel spreadsheet, click in the cell that you would like to be the top left of your data and then simply paste your data.

As we've seen, trading data between Access and Excel can be remarkably simple and efficient. Like my nephew who is going to be joining the happy world of couples who enjoy the synergy of two folks coming together, we can also enjoy the synergy we get when we marry Access and Excel.

The process we described in this month's Wizard makes it ridiculously easy to get data from Excel into Access. There are some notable issues that you may run into. The most common ones stem from the way you have arranged your data in Excel.

Excel makes it very easy to have a pleasant appearance in your spreadsheet with blank rows and columns to help with formatting and layout. If you have these blank rows and columns, when you copy this data into Access, you'll find that you end up with blank rows of data and empty fields with cryptic names (F1 for instance).

Unless you have a lot of data that you are porting from Excel to Access these tend to be more of a nuisance than anything else. On the other hand, if you do have loads of data that you are moving this way, you will probably find it easier to structure the data in Excel so that there are no blank rows or columns prior to copying the data from Excel.