How to export an Access table to Excel on your phone
Often the reason you opened the database is someone else: they need the customer list, the stock count or this month’s orders as a spreadsheet. Here is how to export an Access table to Excel from your phone, and which format to pick when Excel isn’t right.
Short answer
Open the database in Keyfield, open the table, and narrow it down with search, filters and sorting if you only need some rows. Tap Export, choose This view (just those rows, in that order) or Whole table, pick Excel, and save or share the file. Exporting is part of Keyfield Pro, a one-time purchase; reading the table stays free.
Get Keyfield Opens .accdb and .mdb files. Viewing is free, with no account.
Step by step
- Open the database from your email, Drive or Files (how), then tap the table.
- Narrow it down, if you want. Search every column at once, add filters such as “Region is North” or “Total more than 1000”, and sort by the column the reader cares about.
- Tap Export. Choose This view to export exactly what is on screen, filtered and sorted, or Whole table for every row.
- Pick the format: Excel, CSV or PDF.
- Save it where you want it, then share it straight from Keyfield to email, chat or Drive.
The column names in the export are the ones you see in the grid, so if the database designer gave a field a friendlier caption, that caption is what the reader gets.
Excel, CSV or PDF?
| Format | Best for | Limits worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
Excel (.xlsx) | Someone who will sort, total or chart the data | An Excel sheet holds 1,048,576 rows including the header. Keyfield tells you when a view is bigger and suggests CSV. |
| CSV | Very large tables, or loading into another program | No row limit. Data is written as stored, so a cell that starts with =, +, - or @ may be read as a formula when the CSV is opened in Excel. |
| Printing, or sending something nobody should edit | Prints the first 2,000 rows, and says so before you export. |
Dates are exported as real dates in Excel, with one exception: anything before 1 March 1900 is written as text, because Excel’s date system can’t hold those days correctly.
Attachments and other fields
Files stored in an attachment field don’t fit in a spreadsheet cell. Keyfield Pro saves those separately: open the row and save its files to a folder (more on attachment fields).
Without Keyfield Pro
Everything before the export costs nothing: opening the file, every table, every row, search, filters and sorting. You can also copy a single row from the row form and paste it into a message. If you have Access on a PC, its own External Data › Export › Excel does the same job for free, and Access is the better tool if the export has to be repeated every week.
What about the queries?
Keyfield exports tables, not the results of saved queries, because it shows queries as SQL rather than running them. If the person wants what a query returns, read its SQL (how to read a query) and rebuild it with filters on the table it reads from, which is often a single condition or two.
Send the table as a spreadsheet
Keyfield Pro exports a whole table or just your filtered view to Excel, CSV or PDF, and shares it from the phone. One purchase, no subscription; viewing stays free.
