Now that we have seen how Access can distribute data within itself or to other programs, which would be the best method to use? Unfortunately there is no easy answer to this question; it merely depends on how comfortable you are with certain programs.

If you want to create a formal report where you can pull data from a database and include it in a word processor, it would be a good idea to export the data from a report as an RTF file and edit it in the word processor. If you want to make some visual data about the data in your database, a good choice might be to export or analyze data from a query in Excel. These scenarios would be good candidates to export data from Access.

Now imagine you have a fairly large database that takes up ¾ of the space on your hard drive and you want to perform some advanced operations on a table. The table itself is not very large, but it is a very important table with many relationships to others in the database. You simply don’t have the hard drive space to make a full backup copy. Therefore, it would be a good idea to perform a Save As operation on the table and make a quick ‘backup copy’ of just the table. This gives you the freedom to perform actions on the existing table with more peace of mind. Should you do something drastic that makes the database unusable, you can simply copy the data from the table you saved back into the original table and restore the usability of the database.