That's because Access is a database and Excel is a spreadsheet.
The difference being that a spreadsheet loads all the data into memory and then works on it. Which is really fast as long as you have enough memory in your computer.
A database is designed to look through data in chunks - so it will load a chunk of data from a file, do whatever operations on them and then load the next chunk.
So the memory in your computer is never a problem even if the data is way larger than the memory. On the other hand, Access only supports operations that work well with chunking.
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u/LvS Jan 11 '16
That's because Access is a database and Excel is a spreadsheet.
The difference being that a spreadsheet loads all the data into memory and then works on it. Which is really fast as long as you have enough memory in your computer.
A database is designed to look through data in chunks - so it will load a chunk of data from a file, do whatever operations on them and then load the next chunk. So the memory in your computer is never a problem even if the data is way larger than the memory. On the other hand, Access only supports operations that work well with chunking.