E-room alternative (1 Viewer)

[nikkypickles]

I'm fishing for ideas. At the moment, one of our teams is operating what is essentially an Excel database. And it's yucky! It's laid out terribly, the form is horrible and the reports are useless.

Any suggestions that I turn it into a functioning Access database have been vetoed on the basis that people who are on a different network to us need access to the information in the database. This they can get through the Excel route by using an E-room.

Can something similar not be done with Access? I'm dying to get shot of the dreadful working practises that are in place at the moment.

 

[dsigner]

I know nothing about an E room but you could try just linking from Access to the Excell. This would leave the existing system totally in place. You could treat the data as Accessdata and formulate nice reports etc.
Once people start to see what results you get then maybe they will want you use Access themselves.
Thsi will only work if there are reasonable well defined data ranges in the spreadsheet.

 

[KeithG]

You should be able to normalize your tables and still export your info to excell from a query

 

[gemma-the-husky]

Are you on a local LAN or on a WIDE AREA LAN - If you are trying to run Access at remote locations, you are almost bound to get performance problems, and walk into a "I told you so" situation.

Although your database can be accessed within your company, you might find not every user has Access, as its not part of standard office. Although you can provide a runtime version of access, you may need an improved access version to do this, and the runtime version contains no error handling, so you HAVE to write a perfectly resilient application. Again, this might be an "I told you so" situation.

On the positive side, if it fits on to an Excel spreadsheet, its not that big, and Access will interrogate the database at a blinding fast speed, compared with your Excel operation.


good Luck

 

[nikkypickles]

Thanks Gemma.

At the moment it's quite small, but with the potential to grow far larger than Excel can handle.

We've used runtime Access and whatnot outside of the office, but we do have the option to install Access on every PC that would be using it. It was the connection across networks that's causing the headache.

As soon as I get more definitive info I'll be back with a more detailed question.

cheers guys!

 

[gemma-the-husky]

In a distributed Access environment, Access runs on each user's desktop, and data is retrieved from the server and sent to the user's machine for processing. With careful query writing you can minimize or reduce the amount of data that has to be transferred, but if its to a remote location the speed is likely to be of orders of magnitude slower than in a wired LAN.

One way of improving this is to use SQL server or another server side engine, that can process the queries on the server side, and return the answers only to the remote PC, but this may need a lot of work, as achieving the best results from this is not simply a matter of upsizing an Access app to a SQL environment.

I'm sure you will get loads of help here when you need it.