What can you do in Excel that you cannot do in Access?
There are lots of differences as they are two applications
designed for different tasks. Access is mainly for storing lists of
data of different kinds. Excel is for Numerical Analysis and
Manipulation. So its focus is on working with numbers. As such it
provides a much wider range of functions than Access does.
Access stores data in tables, but with Excel it is easier to lay
out tables visually and put all sorts of calculations around them,
like totals and averages, together with the original data. Access
can store the data in tables and do calculations, but they are not
done together.
Excel provides a wide variety of charts, many very specialised,
which Access does not. Excel has the power of doing extensive pivot
tables and gives other ways of analysing data, which Access does
not.
There are a lot of things both can do, but Excel is more
versatile in what it does and it can be used in many creative and
imaginative ways. Access is good at what it does, but it is
designed for different kinds of tasks than Excel is. There are many
other differences. When it comes to processing numeric data of any
kind, Excel does far more.