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Flipadelphia

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 24, 2010
36
0
Hi,

My work just gave me a Mac Air, and I hope that I can completely replace my PC with it.

However, there are certain jobs where I need to access a couple databases. Not edit, but just to run reports and queries. Normally I would have used access.

I am assuming access is not available on mac?

If not is there another alternative to use that is reliable?
 
no MS Access for Mac.

FileMaker is the 'standard' Mac Desktop Database package. They have a sort of 'lite' version called Bento.

No idea if that will help you - I don't think you can connect to an Access database from Filemaker -although I have never tried.

There are a couple of options for running Windows programs on a Mac though:
1) Virtualization - you can run a full copy of Windows in a virtual machine on your Mac. This can be tough on an Air because of limited drive space and limited RAM, although it you only have to run a few programs and then infrequently, you will probably be OK. There are many threads about this - do a search.

2) Remote Desktop - If you still have access to a windows desktop somewhere on your network, you can open a remote desktop connection to it. I personally prefer this to running a VM. MS makes a remote desktop client for the Mac - see Microsoft's Mac site -Mactopia.com

3) Wine - emulates Windows and allows some Windows programs to run natively without a VM. Pretty sure this won't work for Access anyway.
 
I think the only option is to run a Virtual Machine with Windows and MS Access. I don't see any apps to use an Access database on OS X and run reports from it.
 
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