Adding Numbers in a Table

Rylinkus

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I have a table with a bunch of values for time spent on a variety of projects. Each persons time on a project is entered using a form. What I'd like is to then be able to add some of these times to get a total department time and a total project time in the table to help with our project costs estimating. Anyone have any ideas as there doesn't seem to be an easy way in the table itself to merely add columns. Thanks in Advance.
 
An Access table is not an Excel spreadsheet
Basically you need to use summation queries and because these are derived values it would be bad practice to store the totals.

Len
 
Len Boorman said:
An Access table is not an Excel spreadsheet
Basically you need to use summation queries and because these are derived values it would be bad practice to store the totals.

Len


Yeah, I just read something about that and was coming back here to post the same bit of info. I suppose to get reports that show time totals all the calculations are going to need to be done outside the table. And that's no big deal. Now would it be prudent to merely use do the calculations in the report itself. What would the advantage of setting up a query here be? I don't mean to come off as too uninformed on this, but this is all quite new to me.
 
Queries can only show data at one level of aggregation. For example, if you wanted totals by state. You could not also get subtotals by city within states in a query. You would need to use a report.

The biggest hurdle Excel users face when working with Access is that they don't understand that with a spreadsheet the data and presentation layers are merged whereas with a database, they are separate. In a database you store data in tables. You do not use tables for presentation. You use reports for presentation.

The second biggest hurdle is proper table structure but that's a different topic :)
 
Pat Hartman said:
Queries can only show data at one level of aggregation. For example, if you wanted totals by state. You could not also get subtotals by city within states in a query. You would need to use a report.

The biggest hurdle Excel users face when working with Access is that they don't understand that with a spreadsheet the data and presentation layers are merged whereas with a database, they are separate. In a database you store data in tables. You do not use tables for presentation. You use reports for presentation.

The second biggest hurdle is proper table structure but that's a different topic :)


Yeah, it certainly seems like a very nice tool. And with some user friendly forms even the less computer savy people should be able to utilize the info in it.

I read a few threads about table structures and was wondering if anyone could point me to a good article or tutorial on this topic. It's hard to know which articles I dig up on Google are trustyworthy and which are written by guys with only a bit more experience than me. Thanks again for the info guys. It's greatly appreciated.
 

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