ZacCerrato
Board Regular
- Joined
- Jun 2, 2010
- Messages
- 76
I've had Excel fanatics - including a brilliant professor I once had - tell me that anything that can be done on Access could actually be done using Excel. Maybe you all can confirm or deny that for me; here's my situation:
I work for a very small insurance program. My team and I manage the application process. Generally, people send in applications and they either have everything - or they don't. When they don't we send them letters telling them what we need. Sometimes we send them several letters before we have enough to make a decision. After that, we either accept or reject their application and send them another letter.
Currently we keep several spreadsheets (that are tied to Word documents as mail-merges) that serve to create the letters and also keep a record of letters we have sent applicants. Each entry has the date the letter was sent, the applicant's name and address, and information about the decisions that were made.
As it is we (I) often times have to go back to reconstruct a chronological history of certain applicant's application process by opening a few different spreadsheets and doing Ctrl-F searches and, well, its really annoying. If I could set up the system with my limited computer program knowledge I would ideally have set up a simple Access database where each applicant was immediately assigned a unique number that could be tracked through the system. BUT, seeing as we currently have everything in Excel and my co-workers are terrified of Access - can you guys (and gals) think of anyway I could create some sort of spreadsheet where information from all the tables was dumped and collated? Anyway to collect and organize the information from all these spreadsheets would be super useful. Any suggestions?
Thanks, Zac
I work for a very small insurance program. My team and I manage the application process. Generally, people send in applications and they either have everything - or they don't. When they don't we send them letters telling them what we need. Sometimes we send them several letters before we have enough to make a decision. After that, we either accept or reject their application and send them another letter.
Currently we keep several spreadsheets (that are tied to Word documents as mail-merges) that serve to create the letters and also keep a record of letters we have sent applicants. Each entry has the date the letter was sent, the applicant's name and address, and information about the decisions that were made.
As it is we (I) often times have to go back to reconstruct a chronological history of certain applicant's application process by opening a few different spreadsheets and doing Ctrl-F searches and, well, its really annoying. If I could set up the system with my limited computer program knowledge I would ideally have set up a simple Access database where each applicant was immediately assigned a unique number that could be tracked through the system. BUT, seeing as we currently have everything in Excel and my co-workers are terrified of Access - can you guys (and gals) think of anyway I could create some sort of spreadsheet where information from all the tables was dumped and collated? Anyway to collect and organize the information from all these spreadsheets would be super useful. Any suggestions?
Thanks, Zac