Designing a Proposal/Quote reporting database

[lahornby]

As a basic user of Access I believe I have identified a use for the program for the purposes of a reporting task which I am charged with at the moment. We undertake the weekly tracking of proposals, which involves in brief, the action required for the bigger proposals, the teams involved in writing the proposals and follow up information as well as registration of wins and losses etc.
At the moment we use Excel but I am finding it extremely labour intensive with entries having to be removed and captured by only one person on a weekly basis and when you are talking about 40 to 50 new proposals registered nationally in a week and about 100 updates on existing jobs it becomes a perpetual case of chasing your tail.

Am I right in thinking that if we were to design a simple, effective database with a form design that all our research directors could use with ease, and we could merely run reports off each week that this would not produce a far quicker reaction time when it comes to pooling international resources but also far more effective reporting system with which to produce our management summaries?

I am aware that this will probably require quite a bit of consultation on design but before I go shouting the merits of Access to any of my superiors I wanted to make sure I could be confident of Access's capabilities first?

Can anyone advise? point me in the right direction?

Many thanks!

Lisa H.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Access is the perfect tool for an application such as this. Be sure to design the tables carefully. Relational databases are very different from spreadsheets. It will almost certainly be wrong to simply import the spreadsheets. Do some reading on normalization. You can find lots of posts here and also all over the web.

 

[lahornby]

many thanks!

Great news! will certainly push thru with your advice