Microsoft Access User-Level Security Tutorial

If you’re a Microsoft Office power user, you might be familiar with the encryption features of Word, PowerPoint and Excel. These programs all allow file owners to quickly and easily apply encryption through the use of a simple password. Unfortunately, Microsoft Access doesn’t offer similar functionality, but it still has relatively powerful security functionality. In this article, we’ll take a look at Microsoft Access user-level security, a feature that lets you specify the level of access to grant each individual user of your database.

User-level security is quite powerful. It allows you to control the types of data that a user might access (for example, prohibiting sales personnel from looking at accounting data) and the actions they can perform (e.g. only allowing the HR department to change personnel records). Before we begin, it’s important to keep in mind that these functions mimic some of the functionality of more powerful databases, like SQL Server and Oracle. However, Access is still fundamentally a single-user database. If you find yourself attempting to implement complex security schemes with user-level security, you’re probably ready to trade up to a more powerful relational database.

The first step is to start the Wizard, as shown in the image. From the Tools menu, select Security and then User-Level Security Wizard.