Do you need MS Access to query on an Access table?

[AZSteve]

I'm asking these questions because I have looked at a lot of stuff in the
discussion groups and still confused. I am fairly good at Excel programming
but haven't been able to get Excel and Access to talk.

First, I have Office 2003 Professional at work and Office 2003 without
Access at home. I want to work on developing Excel programming at home which
will get data from Access to Excel with either MS Query or with programming.
Is it possible to just have the .mdb files on the home computer for Excel to
work with, or do I need the Access program too?

The info I want to get from Access currently uses Access queries which
prompt for criteria and are rather involved. To use them with Excel I would
want the criteria to be based on cell entries. Would I need to put the
Access SQL language into Excel or could I call the Access queries and feed
them the parameters at the same time (and how)? I can then put the data into
a small (20 row, 4 field) Excel table.

At work the DB is on the network with the users having a front end somewhere
on their computer. Finding the individual front ends is difficult, so from
Excel do I address a separate front end on the network or the back end?

 

[Nigel]

Part of your answer is that you do not need MS Access to read/write to an
Access database. Use the macro recorder to get the basic code when loading
data from your external database, then adapt that to suit.

You can invoke queries stored in the access database or execute the SQL from
within Excel. It depends on your particular set up and how those queries may
need to be changed.

HTH