Use for Access

[endlessboundless]

This is a very noob question but please answer if you have time.

I have a very large worksheets which identifies employees timecard data (employee name, project they worked on, date, ect). It's May there are so many lines. Would it be easier if I set up this excel spreadsheet in access as a database?

Also, i have another worksheet which is essentially GL details on a monthly basis of different depts. Again, its a very large file. Could access be an option here as well?

TYIA

 

[boblarson]

You can set up items like you have in Access but you have to realize that Access is not a "spreadsheet on steroids." That is a common misconception by many people and can lead to frustration and problems. Access is a relational database where Excel is a flat file database. The proper use of Access means designing the tables in a normalized fashion (read this on normalization BEFORE doing anything) and then the pulling of data and aggregating it is much simpler than it would be otherwise.

So, you wouldn't be just transferring over the data exactly as it exists today in the spreadsheets. It would require some thought and effort to get the right table structure and then you would need to use a series of append queries to move the different data to the applicable tables.

One way I can describe this is - in Excel you think short and wide (typically). Which means lots of columns and perhaps not so many rows, although that isn't always the case. And in Access you want to think NARROW and LONG. Which means Not so many columns but using ROWS of data.

Let me give you an example. In your spreadsheet you might have a column for each date. In Access we would end up making it a row for each date and the values stored in the row for that date as well.

I hope that makes sense and can help a bit.

 

[Joe4]

If you are looking for something you can use to do a lot of querying, filtering, summarizing, and reporting of data, Access is a great tool for this kind of thing. But as Bob strongly cautions, the database needs to be designed correctly (i.e. normalized), or you are going to have a lot of problems.