Microsoft® Office Access™ 2007 Plain & Simple

Exporting Data to an XML File

Most programs are able to make use of data stored in text files, but plain text files don’t let you store formatting information, data validation rules, or whether a field only allows users to append data to existing values. However, XML provides the means to encode that information into the body of a text file using tags. These tags indicate where a table row begins, where each cell begins and ends, each column’s data type, any data validation rules applied to the column, and so on. The files Access creates contain a lot of information that is specific to Access, but because Access creates files with tags most other programs can process, the information about your file usually translates between programs just fine. ...