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And as a result, financial analysts use Microsoft Excel a lot.

Excel also helps in tracking, feeding inputs, finding out outputs, and helps in data manipulation.

Excel has built-in rows and columns using which the users create charts, graphs etc.

Access is used as part of the RDMS (Relational Database Management Systems).

And youll find this application in the higher versions of Microsoft Office.

Microsoft Access is preferred over excel when the small business owners need to deal with a lot of reports and queries.

When you would save a database in access, it would be saved as the.mdb extension.

Finance analysts find excel more useful since it allows them to create financial models using several formulas, charts, graphs etc.

On the other hand, access is more useful to small business owners since they need to deal with a lot of reports and queries.

Excel has more flexibility while access is more rigid on how we can use it.

Excel only provides worksheets that are flat or non-relational.

On the other hand, access provides tables that are relational at multiple levels.

Since Excel is easy to use and has a lot of flexibility, a complex statistical model can be built on excel.

But on access, its more about collecting and sorting of data.

And many prefer to excel over access because building systems on access are quite hard.

Lets now look at the head to head differences between excel and access.

On the other hand, Microsoft access can be used as a database application.

Microsoft Access, on the other hand, is quite difficult to master.

You also need a programming language to use most of the features of access.

On the other hand, access is built for small business owners.

For a small business owner, Microsoft excel and access can be useful.

All she needs to do is to understand each of the application in detail so that she can apply them well and use them in the right contexts.

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