Most Unused MS Office Software In your Computer

In almost all computers that people buy today, MS Office application suite are already pre-installed, either in Professional or Enterprise versions.  Since most companies buy computers (laptops and desktops) in Professional or Enterprise versions of MS Office, Access is already part of the installation and comprises a big chunk of the software cost.

However, most employees are not knowledgeable of databases and the capabilities of MS Access, thus they fail to take advantage of its benefits.  They only use MS Excel though their needs might be better serve by using MS Access.  This in turn results to wasted resources on the part of a business entity.

Even basic business task like inventory management, payroll and accounting for expenses and assets should be handled or managed by a full fledged database software like MS Access instead of MS Excel. A database software can protect your data from unauthorized changes because of its built in data security functions.

In addition, Access is a relational database management software that organizes data in related tables and can retrieve them as if they are just in one table through the use of SQL.  

Disadvantages of Using a Spreadsheet like Excel are the following:

• The same data can be misspelled
• Only one user can edit a spreadsheet at a given time
• Full name or abbreviations may be encoded though referring to the same name
• Dates may be encoded in non-date columns

Most companies tend to buy expensive softwares in Accounting, Payroll and other applications used in business. They failed to realize that they can buy much more cheaper software developed in MS Access widely available in the market if they only research and look for it online. Since these applications will run in any computer pre-installed with an applicable version, there is no need to make an investment in additional software cost.

Access can also be configured to be a networked application by splitting the database from its front-end components like the Forms which provide the user interface.  By doing so, you can deploy the database which is the back end to a server, while the front-end which are the user interface, on each networked PC you wish to have access to your application.

You can also use Access to connect to your other database softwares like Oracle, MySQL and many more through an ODBC driver.  By doing so, you can use its Query Design Window to create queries from your other database softwares.  Just be sure to provide read only access in order to ensure that no tables may be modified.

Support to MS Access is also ensured since its Microsoft product.  You can be sure that with every release of Microsoft's Windows operating system, MS Access is supported just like any MS Office application.