Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Secrets of the Office Masters: Creating Links to External Databases

In some cases, you might want to incorporate the contents of an external database file (or a collection of related files) into an Access database. If the external file is available on your system or network, and if the data is stored in a format that Access can use, you can incorporate the data into your Access application in either of two ways: You can import a copy of the data, creating a new table in your Access database. You can also create a link to the external table, without actually importing it into your current database. When you create a link, Access allows you to work with the data just as if it were stored within the Access file—you can establish relationships between ...