Understanding Exports

Exporting is the easier part of the equation. Exporting’s simpler than importing, because it involves moving information from a stricter storage location (the data-base) to one with fewer rules (another type of document).

Here are some of the most common reasons people decide to export information:

• You want to email some information to a friend. You don’t want to send the Access database because your friend doesn’t have a copy Access, or you want him to see only some not all of the data.

• You’re creating a presentation in PowerPoint. The easiest way to dazzle and convince your peers is to show them some impressive information from your database.

• You want to analyze the information in Excel. Access is great for storing and managing your data, but it doesn’t give you the tools to help you figure out what it all means. If you want to crunch the numbers with heavy duty formulas and slick charting features, it makes sense to move it to Excel.

Some programs are intelligent enough to pull the information out of an Access database all on their own. One example’s Word, which provides a mail merge feature that lets you take a list of names and addresses from a database, and then use them to create mailing labels, personalized forms, or any other sort of batch paperwork. When using this feature, you don’t need to perform any exporting instead, you can just point Word to your Access database file. (For more information about Word’s mail merge feature, see Word 2007: The Missing Manual.)

Understanding Imports

You need importing whenever there’s information outside your database that belongs inside it. Suppose you create a state-of-the-art e-commerce database for your buffalo farm. However, some of your sales associates still fill out forms using an old Excel spreadsheet. Now, you need a way to get the information out of the Excel spreadsheet and into your database.

Import operations have two key challenges. The first is making sure the data fits the database’s strict requirements. As you learned in Chapter 1, databases are rule-crazy, and they rudely toss out any information that doesn’t fit (for example, text in a date field). The second challenge is dealing with information that doesn’t quite line upin other words, its representation in the database doesn’t match its representation in the external document. This headache’s more common that you may think.

In your database, you might use status codes (like 4302), while the spreadsheet you want to import uses status names (like High Priority). Or, you may need to break the information you’re importing into more than one linked table, even though it’s stored together in a single document. The customer order spreadsheet for your buffalo farm could include customer information (which corresponds to the Customers table) and order information (for the Orders table). Sadly, you don’t have any easy way to solve these problems. If the external data doesn’t match the representation in the database exactly, you’ll need to change it by hand before or after the import operation.

Here are some pro printing tips that explain how different formatting choices influence your printouts:

• Font. Printouts use your datasheet font and font size. Scale this down, and you can fit more in less space.

• Column order and column hiding. Reorder your columns before printing out to suit what you want to see on the page. Even better, use column hiding (Section 3.1.4) to conceal fields that aren’t important.

• Column widths and row height. Access uses the exact widths and heights that you’ve set on your datasheet. Squeeze some columns down to fit more, and expand rows if you have fields with large amounts of text and you want them to wrap over multiple lines.

• Frozen columns. If a table’s too wide to fit on your printout, then the frozen column is printed on each part. For example, if you freeze the FirstName field, you’ll see it on every separate page, so you don’t need to line the pages up to find up who’s who.

• Sort options. They help you breeze through data in a datasheetand they can do the same for a printout. Apply them before printing.

• Filter options. These are the unsung heroes of Access printing. Use them to get just the important rows. That way, your printout has exactly what you need.

The only challenge you face when using these settings is the fact that you can’t set them from the print preview window. Instead, you have to set them in the datasheet, jump to the print preview window to see the result, jump back to the datasheet to change them a little bit more, jump back to the print preview window, and so on. This process can quickly get tiring.

Removing this kind of data by hand is not only time-consuming, but it’s also easy to miss a thing or two. To help out, Word (and the other main Office 2007 programs) comes with a Document Inspector that can search for potentially private data and remove it from the document automatically. The Document Inspector can remove the following document data:

• Document properties
• Headers, footers, watermarks, and hidden text
• Personal information, such as your username and your personal summary information
• Document versions
• Reviewer comments and annotations
• Custom XML data

Follow these steps to use the Document Inspector:

1. Save the document. If you want to keep an internal version that maintains the personal information, choose Office, Save As and save a copy of the document that you can then share.
2. Choose Office, Prepare, Inspect Document. Word opens the Document Inspector.
3. Click to deactivate the check box next to any content types you don’t want to check.
4. Click Inspect. The Document Inspector checks the document, and then it displays the results of the inspection, as shown in Figure 1.
5. For each type of data you want to delete from the document, click the Remove All but­ton.
6. When you’re done, click Close.

Figure 1 Use the Document Inspector to look for potentially private or sensitive data before sharing a document.

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