MS Office is a very powerful and popular tool to satisfy your business and personal needs. MS Access helps you to build databases and MS Excel is an excellent way to maintain spreadsheet data. One of the drawbacks in using any desktop application is, when you use it over a period of time and have large data, data portability becomes difficult. It gets stuck to the PC in which the file/application is in. Sharing and collaboration may not be easy too. More often MS Access database require a interface to enter the data and use PHP or any server side scripting to update/insert of manipulate the information stored in it. Writing and maintaining Macros for excel spreadsheets could also become difficult once the data becomes huge and complex
Zoho Creator, on the other hand is a web based application, which is equally powerful and simple to build applications that can be served via the browser.
Zoho Migration tool for MS Access & Excel is a simple tool to upload your existing MS Access applications or XL Spreadsheets to Zoho Creator. You just need to have your MS Access MDB file, and import it to this tool. All the tables are imported with the relationships intact, you could just check them and upload them to Zoho Creator as an application or Zoho Reports as a database. In case of the excel spreadsheets, you can import the XL file and each sheet becomes a form and corresponding views are created in the application.
Download MS Access Migration Tool
Download MS Excel Migration Tool
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The following screen shots would help you to understand better to migrate from MS Access Databases and MS Excel Spreadsheets.
Open the MDB file using File -> Import MS Access Database menu. If you want to import a XLS file then click on Import MS Excel Spreadsheet menu.
Once the import is successful, the tool lists the tables in the database, with its field and their properties:
Upload the imported file to Zoho Creator or Zoho Reports using the menu "File -> Upload to Zoho Creator". You can export all the tables as a new application by giving your zoho credentials.
Enter you Zoho User Name and Password and click on upload to Zoho Creator. Login to your Zoho Creator account and check out the application listed in the home page. Now that you have successfully uploaded your mdb file to Zoho Creator, you can share it with your users, enter/update/fetch records as per your requirements. You can also upload the file to Zoho Reports to proceed with your report generation and data analysis. Zoho Reports supports only MS Access Migration. You can upload both XL and MDB files to Zoho Creator.
You can upload data to any of the forms in your application. You need to select the table or sheet from which you want to upload the data and select the corresponding form or you can create a new form on the fly and upload your data. Then you could sign into your creator account and verify that the data has been uploaded to the respective views.
Step 1: To upload data to the existing application, import the xl file that has the data and Click on File -> Upload to Zoho Creator -> Add data to Application from the Menu. Refer the attached screen:
Step 2: Give the details and click on "Upload to Zoho Creator" button.
Download MS Access Migration Tool
In addition to manually migrating data from your Access and Excel files, you can also do the same through command line (console) mode. The command line mode can be used to automate uploading your offline data with existing Zoho Creator application.The arguments for various mode of uploading is mentioned below
Create New Application
zohocreator.exe <filepath> <username> <password> -n <applinkname>
Eg : zohocreator.exe c:\myfolder\ordermanagement.csv john mypassword -n order-management
Create New Form
zohocreator.exe <filepath> <username> <password> -e <applinkname> -n <formlinkname>
Eg : zohocreator.exe c:\myfolder\ordermanagement.csv john mypassword -e order-management -n Order_form
Add Record
zohocreator.exe <filepath> <username> <password> -e <applinkname> -a <formlinkname>
Eg : zohocreator.exe c:\myfolder\ordermanagement.csv john mypassword -e order-management -a Order_form
Add Record (By Shared Users)
zohocreator.exe <filepath> <username> <password> -e <applinkname> -n <formlinkname> -o <ownername>
Eg : zohocreator.exe c:\myfolder\ordermanagement.csv john mypassword -e order-management -a order_form -o Smith
Update Record
zohocreator.exe <filepath> <username> <password> -e <applinkname> -u <formlinkname> <fieldlinkname> <columnname>
Eg : zohocreator.exe c:\myfolder\ordermanagement.csv john mypassword -e order-management -u order_form Items Products
Add Or Update
zohocreator.exe <filepath> <username> <password> -e <applinkname> -au <formlinkname> <fieldlinkname> <columnname>
Eg : zohocreator.exe c:\myfolder\ordermanagement.csv john mypassword -e order-management -au order_form Items Products
where,
-n refers to new application or new form
-e refers to existing application
-o refers to the application owner's name
-u refers to data update
-a refers to'' adding data
-au refers to add/update
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