Can Word, Excel and Access be used together?

[Odie960]

I am taking an computer literacy course and I am having a hard time with it
because it has to do with Microsoft Office ; Word, Excel, and Access. I've
been asked if these programs are interchangeably. I have gone through the
training information and I am not seeing where they are. Can you help?

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

Odie

You are not really making yourself too clear.. all three programs have very
different uses, and are not interchangeable as such.. one is, however, able
to exchange information between them using 'import' and 'merge' functions..

Perhaps you may like to reword your original question if what I have said
does not 'fit' what you expected to read..

 

[JoAnn Paules [MSFT MVP]]

What do you mean by interchangeable? I can do some things with more than one
of the programs but that doesn't mean it's the best tool to use.

 

[Beth Melton]

Are you sure the term wasn't "integrated" rather than
"interchangeable"?

The Office applications are integrated which means you can share data
amongst the applications. You can link an Excel workbook to an Access
database and you can link Excel data in Word documents. Those are just
a couple examples, there are many many more.

Although, each application was designed for a specific purpose but
they are multifunctional too. For example you can create simple
databases in both Word and Excel, such as an address list, but if you
want the full functionality of a database then you should be using
Access which was designed for this purpose. Word can also perform
calculations but it doesn't include the ability to format numbers,
automatically recalculate, or create formulas using relative
referencing. In Excel all of this is very simple because it was
designed for this task.

The Office applications can be compared to vehicles. You can take your
car to the local home improvement store and load up a bunch of bricks
and lumber. You might be able to pull it off but if you took a truck,
which was designed to haul stuff it would be an easy task.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
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