I am supposed to optimize the performance of an old Access DB in my company. It contains several tables with about 20 columns and 50000 rows. The speed is very slow, because the people work with the whole table and set the filters afterwards.
Now I want to compose a query to reduce the amount of data in Excel before transfering the complete rows, but the speed is still very slow.
First I tried the new power query editor from Excel. I first reduced the rows by selecting only the last few ones (by date). Then I made an inner join with the 2nd table.
Finally I got less than 20 rows returned, and I thought I was fine. But when I started Excel to perform the query, it took 10 - 20 seconds to read the data. I could see, Excel loads the complete tables, before setting the filters.
My next try was to create the same query direcly inside the Access DB, same setting. Then I opened this query in Excel, and the time to load the rows is nearly zero. You select "refresh", and the result is shown instantly.
My question is: Is there any way to perform a query in Excel only (without touching the Access file), that is nearly as fast as a query in Access itself?
Best regards, Stefan
Of course.
Just run an SQL query from MS Query in Excel. You can create the query in Access, and copy-paste the SQL in MS Query. They're executed by the same database engine, and should run at exactly the same speed.
See this support page on how to run queries using MS Query in Excel.
More complex solutions using VBA are available, but shouldn't be needed.