newbie problem

[yaro]

I have an Excel spreadsheet that me and my GF use for house budget. It would probably be worth to convert it to Access database but I'm completely green in this field. The spreadsheet is updated at the beginning of every month with the account balance. Then it gets more detailed with all the spendings like food, cloths, petrol, travel, rent, income and other. Some of these categories are more granular like e.g. in food we've got 5 major shops. The major goal is to be able to clearly view our monthly savings and how they spread over months. Excel works well for that purpose but it becomes unclear. Especially when it gets to finding things and doing the comparison. I'm guessing that a database with a nice form would be much better here. Unfortunately the tutorials I found are usually dealing with creating a database of CDs and such. I downloaded the home budget template from Microsoft but that was to complex for me to customize. I couldn't get the grasp of all the relations and there was only one table with lots of forms attached to it. I also find it difficult to decide what should be a record and what should be a field and why creating relations between tables doesn't quite work for me. Would it be possible to somehow use my Excel spreadsheet to get data into a database? Could someone please point me in the right direction? Many thanks
yaro

 

[Guus2005]

First welcome at this forum!

You probably should learn the basics of working with Access. Access is a relationale database management system (rdbms) and it's all about relations as is any database.

I am not familiair with the home budget template from Microsoft but on this forum you will find ALL the answers to your questions!

Relations an example:
There is a relation between a table called Products and a table called Shopping. The table Shopping has an Id, a field called ShoppingDate and a field called ProductId. the Field ProductId refers to the field Id in the Product table. Because prices change it is better to add the field Price to the Shopping table.
The Products table contains all the fields specific for a product. Such as Id, Name, Supplierid and Weight.
You might notice that i didn't mention the Price which is also specific to a product. But is is not only specific to a product but also to a shop
You might want to add a table Shop, containing Id, Shopname and Address end a table ShopProduct containing the fields Id, ShopId, ProductId and Price

Again the above is an example.

Anything you might want to ask: http://www.access-programmers.co.uk/

Hope this helps, HTH

 

[yaro]

Many thanks. I'll try again and report the problems I encounter on the forum.
yaro