I’m about to buy a Macbook as my main computer. But I also use Access a lot, especially the mail-merge function (Word/Access). I’ve read your comments in MacRumors about the likelihood of Microsoft creating Access for Macintosh. What do you recommend instead?
Can you run Microsoft Access natively on the Macintosh? Â No. Â Microsoft does not make a version of Access for the Macintosh.
Can you preserve or use your Access data on the Macintosh? Â It depends on what you’re doing with Access. If mail merge is your most important task, then you can likely accomplish the same thing with Word and Excel. Excel 2008 can handle workbooks of up to 1 million rows and 16,000 columns.
Or you could also move your address data into Entourage, and do a mail merge from there.
For other database needs, take a look at Bento or FileMaker. Â Both will be able to import from Access (mostly after exporting the Access data into a CSV). Â Please keep in mind that Bento is aimed at consumer needs, where FileMaker Pro is designed with more expandability, and business or enterprise needs.
A virtual Machine (VMWare, Parallels, VirtualBox, etc) could be used to run Access….Then you can run Access on your Mac for the times when you need it. This makes the most sense if you have a lot of big databases and you use Access frequently.