Access

Microsoft Office Access, previously known as Microsoft Access, is a relational database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of applications and is included in the Professional and higher versions for Windows and also sold separately.

Access stores data in its own format based on the Access Jet Database Engine. It can also import or link directly to data stored in other Access databases, Excel, SharePoint lists, text, XML, Outlook, HTML, dBase, Paradox, Lotus 1-2-3, or any ODBC-compliant data container including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Software developers and data architects can use it to develop application software and non-programmer "power users" can use it to build simple applications. Like other Office applications Access is supported by Visual Basic for Applications, an object-oriented programming language that can reference a wide variety of objects, including DAO (Data Access Objects) and ActiveX Data Objects, and many other ActiveX components provided by Microsoft or by third parties. Visual objects used in forms and reports expose their methods and properties gracefully in the VBA programming environment, and a huge selection of Windows operating system functions can be declared and called from VBA code modules, making Access a rich programming environment.