Confused & Lost

Neill

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May 26, 2011
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Hi all:)

My name is Neill, i am from the UK. I have mainly been in sales ever since i left university back in the mid nineties.
I have just joined a small business which is owned by a friend, and they have their database on Excell. I desperately want to help them be more efficient but just do not have the skills to completely move them over to access.

I hope joining this forum can end my desperation :)

Here's looking forward!
 
Welcome.

You may have already worked out some of this stuff but I thought it would be good to mention.

One difficulty Excel power users sometimes have when coming to Access is having to forget about the structure of a spreadsheet and change their thinking to related tables. It can be counter-intuitive and there are two important fundamental differences to keep in mind.

Unlike Excel where data storage and presentation is integrated into a Sheet, Access Tables only hold data while presentation is done in Forms and Reports. Consequently information one would sensibly put in adjacent cells in a speadsheet may be distributed across multiple tables. It can seem crazy to a human brain but it is what works for the machine.

Secondly is the realisation that a table is very different from a data-only spreadsheet that might look exactly the same as that table.

Tables records have no intrinsic order or relationship to each other. The familiar concept in Excel of comparing a value to one in the previous row is not straightforward as it is in a spreadsheet.

The main thing before you get into designing databases is to thoroughly understand normalization.

Another important point is to avoid difficult to access data strucutres. Though technically not normalization per se, it is vitally important to make sure the data is as accessible as possible. We get many questions here where a new developer has painted themselves into a corner a long way into the project because they didn't understand this aspect of design.

In this regard, alarm bells should ring loudly when you find yourself building a table with repeating field names like something1, something2, something3. The queries to work with this structure are often become a nightmare.
Welcome to the forum. I have copied rhis reply from Galaxiom ecause I think it will be helpful to you especially the advice about understanding Normalization. Don't be afraid to ask questions - the more specific the better. Also remember that there is a lot of information already posted here so don't be afraid to search to see if your question has already been answered
 
Hi there,
I guess I am also in the same predicament as Neil. I am very comfortable with Excel. I have just started in a firm which runs a bus transport service.
I know that Access can be very useful especially when we link the relevant tables but somehow I cant seem to understand how to link the the tables together.
I will read up on normalization and then head off to understand better the works of Access.
 
I am also new but just wanted to say hello and best of luck with moving everything to Access!
 

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