Using Microsoft Office for Mac as a Relational Database

By Jim Gordon, co-author of Office 2011 for Mac All-in-One For Dummies.

Part 5 - Forms and Data Input

There are three ways to input data into an Excel data source workbooks.:
If you want fancy input forms, the possibilities are nearly limitless. You can make forms on regular Excel worksheets, Excel dialog sheets (Excel 2011 only), or in VBA Userforms (Excel 2011 only). You will need to know VBA to fetch the data from your input form and again to populate your data tables. You can make controls that let you drop or add tables (worksheets). You can make macros to add, delete and modify records (rows), or add and delete fields (columns).

To use the examples in this tutorial, click here to save an example database Excel workbook called ExampleData.xls to a folder called DatabaseExample in your Documents fol
der.

When using database files other than Excel as data sources, you have read-only privileges. You can not add, delete, or modify tables or records using ODBC in the Mac version of Office.


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