Hi, everyone. I've been reading this forum for several days now and the information I have picked up here has been wonderful. Thanks. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find what I'm looking for on a problem I'm having. I apologize for the long post, but I wanted to include as much information as possible. Thanks for taking the time to look at my problem.
My Background: I am a Computer Managed Maintenance System Planner for a foundry. I am responsible for the administration of all maintenance and repair records for the plant’s mobile equipment (dump trucks, fork lifts, etc.) I’ve been using Access as a report writer for several years. I have pretty good understanding of report writing and basic query writing, although I have never used pivot tables or crosstab queries, and I have only used amend/update queries a few times. I have a novice’s understanding of relational databases and I recently picked up a book on VB for MS Applications and have been devouring it. The rest of my limited VB knowledge comes from reading these forums, so my programming knowledge is still in its infancy.
What I’m Using: I am on a network that uses Windows 2K, to which I have only regular user privileges. We use an Oracle database (it is used for everything in the plant) with a third party CMMS. I use Access 2002 to do my report writing. I have a small database set up that contains links to the necessary tables in Oracle and a few tables I created to help “massage” my data for queries and reports.
My Problem: Our CMMS app is only set up to retain the current and the previous hour meter/mileage readings. I need to be able to retain all my hour/mileage readings, however, so that I can track up/down time, utilization, etc., over several different periods of time, including years.
What I Want To Be Able To Do: I want to archive my hour/cycle readings in a table so that I can reference them for later queries and reports. A couple of typical questions I want to be able to ask of this information are
1) “What was the last known hour/mileage reading for this/all equipment on <date>?”
2) “How many hours/miles have passed between <date1> and <date2>?”
What I Have Done So Far: I’ve done research into crosstab queries and pivot tables. I don’t fully understand these, but they don’t seem to be what I’m looking for. I could be wrong, though. Then I got to thinking that the easiest thing for me to do might be to make a button on my main form that would run a query to append the hour data from the db to a table I made to store the info (tblMeterArchive). The table would have a column for the Equipment# and then the append query would create a new column with today’s date as the heading and dump the data into it. The problem is I can’t figure out how to get a query to add a column to a table and stick today’s date in the heading. I’ve searched these forums and I’ve done a Google, to no avail. I have even taken time to just start going through every thread to see if this sort of thing has been discussed before. So far I haven’t found anything and my boss is getting a bit peeved at the hours I have spent working on this so far this week.
So, my question is can an append query create new columns in a table? Or, am I barking up the wrong the tree and there is a better/easier to accomplish my goals? Even a link or pointer to the proper way to search for the information I need would be much appreciated.
Thanks again for taking the time to look at my problem.
My Background: I am a Computer Managed Maintenance System Planner for a foundry. I am responsible for the administration of all maintenance and repair records for the plant’s mobile equipment (dump trucks, fork lifts, etc.) I’ve been using Access as a report writer for several years. I have pretty good understanding of report writing and basic query writing, although I have never used pivot tables or crosstab queries, and I have only used amend/update queries a few times. I have a novice’s understanding of relational databases and I recently picked up a book on VB for MS Applications and have been devouring it. The rest of my limited VB knowledge comes from reading these forums, so my programming knowledge is still in its infancy.
What I’m Using: I am on a network that uses Windows 2K, to which I have only regular user privileges. We use an Oracle database (it is used for everything in the plant) with a third party CMMS. I use Access 2002 to do my report writing. I have a small database set up that contains links to the necessary tables in Oracle and a few tables I created to help “massage” my data for queries and reports.
My Problem: Our CMMS app is only set up to retain the current and the previous hour meter/mileage readings. I need to be able to retain all my hour/mileage readings, however, so that I can track up/down time, utilization, etc., over several different periods of time, including years.
What I Want To Be Able To Do: I want to archive my hour/cycle readings in a table so that I can reference them for later queries and reports. A couple of typical questions I want to be able to ask of this information are
1) “What was the last known hour/mileage reading for this/all equipment on <date>?”
2) “How many hours/miles have passed between <date1> and <date2>?”
What I Have Done So Far: I’ve done research into crosstab queries and pivot tables. I don’t fully understand these, but they don’t seem to be what I’m looking for. I could be wrong, though. Then I got to thinking that the easiest thing for me to do might be to make a button on my main form that would run a query to append the hour data from the db to a table I made to store the info (tblMeterArchive). The table would have a column for the Equipment# and then the append query would create a new column with today’s date as the heading and dump the data into it. The problem is I can’t figure out how to get a query to add a column to a table and stick today’s date in the heading. I’ve searched these forums and I’ve done a Google, to no avail. I have even taken time to just start going through every thread to see if this sort of thing has been discussed before. So far I haven’t found anything and my boss is getting a bit peeved at the hours I have spent working on this so far this week.
So, my question is can an append query create new columns in a table? Or, am I barking up the wrong the tree and there is a better/easier to accomplish my goals? Even a link or pointer to the proper way to search for the information I need would be much appreciated.
Thanks again for taking the time to look at my problem.
