Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with access

Assigning a keyboard shortcut to a macro in Access 2007

Proginoskes — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:15:42 -0800

Is there a simple way to assign a keyboard shortcut to a macro in Access 2007? I understand that macros behave differently in Access than they do in Excel (which I'm more familiar with). I have written a sub called "ImportAll" in Module1. I'd like it to run when I push Ctrl+I. How would I go about achieving this?

Learning to use VBA

Proginoskes — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:31:13 -0800

I have read that John Walkenbach's books are the de-facto standard for learning to use VBA in Microsoft Excel. I'd like to know what books are recommended to learn to use vba in other Office products - primarily Access, but also Word and Powerpoint. I'm more interested in books than in websites.

Help me Access my SQL!

keep it tight — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 07:35:03 -0800

Ok, I have an application that is using a back end of MS Access...I have another application that needs to get some of the data in the Access db but it is only SQL compatible. So...how do I set up an ODBC connection that will pull data from the Access db and write it out to a SQL db? This data needs to be updated hourly... Thanks for your assistance!

Best practices for software development documentation

desjardins — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:06:23 -0800

I do some developery-type stuff at work and the more complicated it gets, the less organized I am. I often find myself wondering why I did this or that or what I was trying to accomplish with it. I reuse a lot of the same functions and bits of code but I don't have a good system of keeping track of them. I know about commenting within code, and I do that, but I'm looking for a larger system of general best practices more than a specific solution. I'm the only one who works on 95% of the stuff I'm doing so these notes are mostly for me right now, but later on it will be very important to be able to communicate Why Things Are The Way They Are and What To Do.

Flying tips with a baby

Admira — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 20:29:16 -0800

My Wife and our 1 year old and I are about to embark on a 3 leg trip. I'm after generic airport/airline tips for babies but I have a few specific things to address. I'd love to be able to have some sort of priority check-in. I am a Qantas Frequent Flyer and I'm flying oneworld airlines, but I don't have any of the exclusive club access or platinum cards or anything like that. We just have regular economy tickets with JAL and American Airlines. Are there any services that allow us to bypass the long arduous wait to check in?

We have 5.5 hours in Narita airport. If there is a lounge we can access during that time I'm keen to find out. I looked into priority pass but as we are leaving Sunday I don't have time to get it processed and have the card in my hand. Any tips for lounge access in terminal 2 of Narita airport?

And any other airport/airline tips greatly appreciated. I've read the other links I could find on this topic which were very handy (change of clothes for us! Brilliant!)

Building a house to accommodate pain and disability

galadriel — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 07:42:38 -0800

Everything I do, all day, every day, hurts. The more I do things that are painful, the more the pain snowballs. We're going to build a house that we hope will help reduce the accumulation of pain, and maybe even let me recover a little. Help me make sure I'm covering all the bases in house design accommodations. I want to make this as fully accommodating as possible. Have I missed anything? (I've tried to read ADA accommodation regulations, incidentally, and I can not believe how insanely detailed they are without actually saying anything useful.)

I have injuries, neurological weirdness, joint pain, nerve pain, muscle pain, numbness. I can't walk straight and I pass out a lot. (I fortunately get a touch of warning just before a syncope episode--blacking out--so I can usually make it to somewhere safe to fall.) Bending over hurts my back AND may make me pass out. I can't extend my arms or lift them above my head for long. Most of the time I'm independently mobile (if wobbly). Infrequently, I can't walk independently and either need assistance or a wheelchair.

I'm currently in a house that was custom built for a couple of short people; we didn't realize how much of an effect that would have when we bought it. We've done what we can in small ways to make things easier on me, but to make this house really what I need we'd have to gut it down to the walls and start over. I'll shortly have the opportunity to custom build a house for ME (and my spouse, who has indicated that he doesn't care much about the way a house looks as long as it works out for me, and contains a few things he really wants). I'm 5'10" and he's 2" taller, so custom heights, etc for me should work well enough for him.

Construction companies are willing to work with me to make the house right, but since this isn't a typical disability--not that any are "typical," I think--they're letting me specify what I want in terms of accommodations.

This is the single largest undertaking of my life, and it's so important. If we can get it right, maybe we can reduce the amount of pain I am in all of the time. Every single thing I do hurts; just standing hurts, but then if I, say, go to chop a vegetable, I have to bend in a sort of hunch for a while. That makes the pain worse, and the extra pain causes extra fatigue, and I feel terrible for hours, sometimes days. Everything I do. All day long. It all hurts. The pain all accumulates.

So I really, really want to get this right. We need to minimize obstacles/walls I'll bump into, keep me from having to bend over, sit, reach above my head, or lift heavy things--unnecessarily, or for extended periods of time, or at all where possible.

This is what I have so far:

General--
* Single story, full wheelchair access: from parking, through exterior doors, to throughout interior of house. Not just for the infrequent instances when I'm in a wheelchair, but also to reduce tripping, bumping into walls, and otherwise having the house interfere with my locomotion.
* No high thresholds, smooth low-grade ramping up to and over any necessary changes in height.
* Smooth flooring throughout: no carpet, no changes in height or high thresholds at changes in flooring type.
* 36" minimum all doors, wider if possible. Wide passthroughs (42" if possible), minimal hallways if any, room for safe maneuvering of wheelchair or unsteady person.
* Perhaps double pocket doors typically left open to any room we might want to close off occasionally (MBR, "den," etc).
* Room in master bedroom and bathroom to maneuver wheelchair if needed.
* Round corners on anything that does stick out, like the edges of a kitchen island.

One fully handicapped accessible bathroom: make it easier to sit and stand, make it less likely I'll pass out in the shower--
* Lots of room to maneuver
* Extra tall toilets
* Extra tall vanity (40-44")
* Large sinks with tall faucets
* Grab bars at toilet and in shower
* Roll-in shower (requires floor sloped for drainage) with fixed-height showerhead in convenient place for standing shower
* Shower seat (about 24"x16") with adjustable showerhead centered behind
* Curved shower curtain bar to make shower area as large as possible, and so that when shower curtain is pulled back, shower area is extra maneuvering room.
* No shelves that stick out--particularly in the shower, but also throughout the bathroom itself. (IE, no soap dish)
* Anything that does stick out (edge of vanity counter, etc) rounded off.
* A garden tub would be nice, if I can safely get in and out.
* Grab bars *everywhere*.

Kitchen accessibility requirements: keep me from having to hunch, bend down, reach up for longer than absolutely necessary--

* Lots of room to maneuver
* Extra tall counters (40-44"), sink, faucet (possibly in an island, leaving counters under wall cabinets at normal height)
* Large sink
* Investigate countertop dishwasher (drawer dishwasher)
* Side-by-side refrigerator
* Large pantry
* Roll out shelving (drawers) for below counter storage
* Hanging storage: from ceiling, from walls , to keep most everything at chest/shoulder height so I minimize reaching down or up

Misc--
* Owner parking (ie, garage) opens directly to kitchen: smooth transition (no bumps, no high thresholds), for wheelchair or for hauling in groceries etc in wheeled cart.
* Easy to use interior, exterior and garage doors, car-height and people-sized (you only have to have one sticky or heavy-without-good-framing or hard-to-open door, when you're like me, to feel like you need to specify this).
* Electric outlets and light switches at easy-to-reach standing height (about 48", I think)

~ ~ ~

I do not know if, at some point in the future, I'll spend more time in a wheelchair than I do now. I *think* the right thing to do is to build the house for me at standing height, because sitting is the single hardest thing I do regularly. I currently spend as much time as possible either standing or lying down.

So, aside from "building everything at this height means that I won't be able to reach it if I'm eventually wheelchair-bound", am I missing anything, major or minor?

Side note: we have lever door handles in this house, and I *hate* them. The mechanism seems fragile; different parts wear out and the handle gets to where it's harder to use than a round doorknob. Are there other alternatives? If we have mostly pocket doors inside, that's one thing, but there are still exterior doors.

On that note, is there anything that can make a sliding glass door easy to open, and remain easy to open?

Data Driven Clinical Care - Dynamic Graphing Website

rosswald — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 13:56:00 -0800

I would like advice on creating a dynamic graphing website to display clinical data on a intranet website to better aide clinicians. What my superiors are seeking is a "Data Mall." My programming/server-admin. experience is minimal, but my Linux-hobbyist mentality hates the MS Access solution that is being built. The scene:

So, our administrators have fallen in love with a concept that they have seen at a conference where clinicians could quickly and easily see a short list of their patients who have certain 'abnormal' clinical values/conditions, or to rank themselves amongst other providers according to certain metrics. Etc. Some call it a "Data Mall."

Our senior data coordinator has done a great job of leveraging an MS Access database (pulled from our true clinical database) with a VB front-end to be accessed by all providers. But, it still kind of sucks. It takes a long time to load, and is just unwieldy to ask clinicians to use the Access front-end.

Me, and where I have gotten so far:

I have previously setup my own LAMP CentOS server running MediaWiki just for fun, and was basically able to create a similar setup on a Windows PC using "EasyPHP", on top of which I installed Mediawiki and found a script for making calls to "Ploticus" from Mediawiki. I was able to display the simplest-of-simplest pie-charts on my wiki.

The heart of the matter:

The problem is that this solution seems complex, especially since my PHP and SQL knowledge is limited. Would the best solution just to be to dig in and master this option? Any recommendations for starting points?

Or is there another tool, method, etc. that I should be looking at?

I realize that building this could almost be a full-time job, but like I said, part of me is just intrigued by the challenge, and part of me wants to impress the higher-ups. Still, maybe it is best left to the pros...?

Comma delimited list to multiple lookup values in Access 2010

monkey closet — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 02:14:24 -0800

Is there an easy way of turning a comma-separated list into multiple lookup values in access 2010? A colleague has an Excel table, the last column of which contains multiple values, comma delineated. These represent a one-to-many relationship with data in another table.

We're trying to move it across to Access 2010. The relationship is set up, but there's simply too much information in the table to manually enter each item. Obviously, each value in the comma separated column needs to become a separate entry in the link table.

Is there a way of getting the info across?

Advice needed: moving a MS Access DB to the cloud..

Sagres — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 20:09:28 -0800

Our small office uses a MS Access database daily for non profit work. The database is small enough where I'm not certain it warrants upgrading to SQL. Most of the work done in the database is remote (7 users total) so we are looking to move from a standalone PC w/remote access to the cloud. I would greatly appreciate any advice with regard to moving the DB to a cloud service provider that supports MS Access. One that is reliable, is relatively easy to admin e.g., backups and lastly, inexpensive.

Printing one form

notned — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:56:40 -0800

Access - trying to get by with the easiest way. There's a form and a table. After the form is filled out it needs to be printed and go to the table. Going to the table is fine. The problem - if the exact sequence of clicks is not followed then you print all the forms. Macro? Other ideas?

MS Access remains not user friendly for printing

jeather — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 08:44:52 -0800

I've switched my Access 2010 database from using Switchboard to using a Navigation Form. It's prettier and faster and it makes it impossible to print reports properly. If I select reportPrintable from my Navigation form, I get to put in my parameter(s). Then I can view it. If I try to print, I print the navigation form around it, too. This happens if I add the print button that Access so kindly provides to the form.

What I have, that sort of works, is a button on the report itself. On Click, I run the macro as follows:

Private Sub Command102_Click()
DoCmd.SelectObject acReport, "reportPrintable", True
DoCmd.RunCommand acCmdPrint
End Sub

This selects the report and prints the current report without the navigation form, but I have to reenter the parameters I used. This isn't reasonable for the long term. There are about a half dozen reports that have to be printed, and each report has either one or two parameters. (Either an ID number, a year, or a year and a month.)

Is there any way to fix this so it works more like the Switchboard used to work, or do I have to go back to it?

What sort of database for a non-profit training organisation?

harriet vane — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 00:51:34 -0800

I need to organise some kind of database for my non-profit training organisation, to track students, courses taken, etc in Moodle, and possibly to integrate with a Joomla site as well. I've been told that Access will not work for us. Will a Customer Relations Management thing suit us, or is something more required? If so, what should we be looking for? Requirements and constraints inside. Staff: < 10 with me being the most tech-savvy, but I've never worked with a database before.
Budget: free is great, cheap is acceptable, enterprise-level is out of the question.
Customer-base: a couple of thousand and growing.

Requirements:
- GUI or other easy-to-use interface
- tracking which courses our clients have taken, contact details, organisation/department, etc.
- can be used as an external database for Moodle authentication (requires mapping of tables, I believe)
- push a training/events calendar to Joomla

Bonus points:
- can be used as an external database for Moodle enrolments (more mapping?)
- can be used to create a single-sign-on between Joomla and Moodle
- integrates with Outlook or has email capability

I think this means I'm looking for a database which can run on the same server as our Moodle and Joomla, but has a GUI too. If that GUI isn't all about following up sales leads (or can be modified, have plugins, whatever), that'd be lovely.

Recommendations so far:
Access - doesn't have a GUI when run on a server, I think? Can I get one for it?
SugarCRM (community version) - good for the CRM part, but will it integrate with Moodle/Joomla?
and
A billion dodgy-looking software sites - I think I'm not using the right Google terms!

Suggestions or recommendations for software, useful articles or better search terms are all welcome :)

Relational database on the cheap

philosophygeek — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:18:41 -0800

I'm looking for a free/cheap alternative to Access or Filemaker for simple relational database work. I'm volunteering with a small club that is trying to track the amount of time club members spend on projects as well as some metrics for those projects. We got a trial of Filemaker, and the program does exactly what we need. The problem is cost: buying licenses is outside of our non-existent budget, and if we wanted to access the database through a server, it's way out of our price range.

We would have fewer than 10 people using the database, so scale is not a huge concern for us. We'd have enough records linked in ways that using a spreadsheet is not ideal, but we're not talking about millions of rows—probably less than a dozen tables with at most a hundred or so rows per table.

Features we're looking for:
- Simple interface for creating the database backend as well as forms & reports for interacting with the database
- Cross-platform (Windows and Mac)
- Ability to share the database remotely,whether through Dropbox or hosted on a domain
- Low learning curve (our tech guy can handle creating queries in Filemaker, but SQL is outside our skill sets)
- Cheap, or ideally free

What can the hive mind recommend for us?

Seeking on-line training in MS Office

dg — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:20:51 -0800

Seeking recommendations for on-line training on business applications, particularly MS Office. We are currently using MS Office 2007 on Windows 7, but will be updating to Office 2010 in a coupe of months. If it matters, the IT environment is very locked-down with a high degree of security and a very pessimistic attitude towards any content even remotely questionable. IE8 is the only browser available.

I'm looking for a solution that offers on-line training across the suite of applications, but particularly Word and Excel (Access to a lesser extent). My searches keep leading me back to lynda.com and searching AskMe seems to provide nothing but positive feedback. I'm interested in alternatives, though. Particularly interested in a multi-user arrangement rather than paying separately for each staff member. Looking for training to suit a range of skill levels.

The goal is primarily to increase skill levels and allow people to access the training as it fits in with their work schedule. Certification is not required, although it would be a nice plus for those who are interested.

Access Concatenation Crazy!

horseblind — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:52:09 -0800

In Access 2010 I've come across a need to concatenate fields from one column in one table into a single, comma delmited value in another field in the same table (or in another table if I absolutely must). I've been working on an access database and have hit a wall after MANY hours of work and being THAT close to wrapping up my work.

I've read much on how todo this and it seems Allen Browne has it licked I've written the module as instructed and that comiles just fine. I've had many other different errors that I've gotten past and am down to getting a syntax error.

I have a table called tbl_phoneSources. The table is currently laid out like this:
Phone LastName Sources
__________________________
5552515392 Gates Source4
5552515392 Gates Source2
5552515392 Gates Source1
5552201356 Ellison Source3
5552201356 Ellison Source1
5652201356 Jobs Source4
5652201356 Jobs Source1

I want it to become:
Phone LastName Sources
_________________________________________
5552515392 Gates Source4, Source2, Source1
5552201356 Ellison Source3, Source1
5652201356 Jobs Source4,Source1

After creating the module I have finally come down to using this expression in a fourth AS field in my query. Despite seeing MANY examples illustrating very much the same thing I want to do I just can't get past my syntax errors.

Here's what seems to work for most who also have issues:
ConcatRelated("source","tbl_phoneSources","[phone] = #" & [phone] & "# AND [lastName] = '" & [lastName] & "'")

Did I make a typo? Do I just not understand this?

Accessible Access Training?

rosswald — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 07:24:54 -0800

Microsoft Access Training/Classes in New York City (Manhattan), or your best suggestion of online materials. A coworker asked if I knew anything about an MS Access class she could take in NYC. The company would be willing to pay for it, but it would preferably only one or two days long.

Good online resources would be accepted also as I had trouble seperating out the chaff on Google, but again, live is preferred.

Thanks!

Help me Normalize

Just this guy, y'know — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:27:07 -0800

I need to split a field in a database into lots of fields, in order to normalise the database, but I can't figure out how to do it. I want to make a one shot (or as few shots as possible) way to split up this field.
I've used excel to stitch together a bunch of XML files and pulled out two fields: RouteName(primary key) and Nodes.
The problem is that Nodes is actually a load of numbers which need to be separate.

Example:
REDROUTE / 125 456 88547 9658
BLUEROUTE / 125 554 88754 9857

So it should be RouteName, RouteOrder, Node (with the primary key being RouteName and RouteOrder)

Example:
REDROUTE / 0 / 125
REDROUTE / 1 / 456
REDROUTE / 2 / 88547
and so on.

The problem is that there are a lot of these, 7000 ish routes, with up to 116 nodes. My version of excel can't handle the whole lot.
It feels like this would be a pretty common problem and there would be a function built in somewhere to handle it.

The reason it needs to be a simple straightforward method is that I need to write it up and hand it over to less technical people to do possibly quite regularly as part of a longer process.

Web front end for SQL Server?

Rafaelloello — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:30:58 -0800

Are there really no web front end design environments that are as stupid simple as MS Access form design for a SQL Server back end? I can write a real clever stored procedure for SQL Server and assign cute and short aliases to every element of the result set and crank out an Access form or forms in no time and distribute it as a light weight front end with only execute permission required. Is there some analog for a web front end? In Microsoft Access I can create a nice svelte data project, publish it as an ade (Access Development Extension, I think?) and users on our network can have a tiny little client that is 1-5MB in size and serves up the data they need without any (known)credentials or even read access to the back end data on SQL Server. They simply have execute permission on the stored procedures on which their forms are based. If they have MS Access, fine. If they don't we can facilitate installing the runtime redistributable and all these light and elegant front ends work just the same. Ok, now that we've thinned the crowd down substantially, here's my question: Isn't there something that will let me create quick forms based on back end stored procedures using the web browser as the UI? It seems logical that I should be able to. Here are the credentials and location specifics to access the back end. Here is the stored proc I want to base the form on. Can I please have a little tool box to drag UI controls to a web-based form and a drop down to pick which parameters/aliases match up to each control? Maybe format one control and then copy and paste it and assign it to another parameter? Please?

Excel keeps unreferring my references

jeather — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:24:26 -0800

Excel 2010 query using data from MS Access: refreshing the query screws with my cell references. Help me make it stop. Sheet one, data: pulls query from a database using parameters on sheet two.
Sheet two, form: has room to enter parameters, then has a bunch of cells that refer to the data sheet.

Eg: parameters are in form!b1 and form!b2. These work perfectly.
The query starts in data!a1.

In form!b10, b11, b12, etc, I want to get the content of data!c1, c2, c3, etc. This works. The first time.

But when I refresh the parameters and return fewer items than the last time, my =data!c3, etc, turn into data!#REF (eg, if I had 20 items the first time, then have 2, I get lines 1 and 20 filled with the info from items 1 and 2, and lines 2-18 with reference errors). This happens whether or not I use absolute references.

How can I fix this?

How to obtain recent Foreign Service Institute learning materials?

andendau — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 22:45:29 -0800

How do I obtain newer Foreign Service Institute language learning coursework and education materials? I have seen some materials produced by the Foreign Service Institute to teach different languages. Most of the materials that I have seen are from quite long ago and may be a little bit outdated. How can I obtain newer versions of FSI produced coursework? Would I have to file a Freedom of Information Act? Would they reject it based on anything? Has anyone tried to access these types of materials and been rejected?

Where did my DAO go?

tdismukes — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:49:21 -0800

Microsoft Access programming problem - what do I have to configure in my database to make use of the DAO object? I'm working through a tutorial book on programming Access applications and at the same time applying lessons from the book to a real-world project. The book has a CD with sample databases which can be altered in the course of the exercises for each chapter.

The following is a bit of code from Chapter 8 of the book, which I typed in and which works perfectly in the supplied Chapter 8 database:

Private Sub ShowRecord_Click()
'Find the selected record, then close thedialog box

Dim rst As DAO.Recordset

'Store the recordset for the Subscribers form
Set rst = Forms!Subscribers.RecordsetClone

'Locate the record for the selected subscriber
rst.FindFirst "SubscriberID = " & List0

'Set the form's Bookmark property to move to the record
Forms!Subscribers.Bookmark = rst.Bookmark
'Close the dialog box
DoCmd.Close acForm, "GoToRecordDialog"

End Sub

I've tried copying this code over to my real-world project, where it should serve exactly the same function (except that I've changed the names of the forms as appropriate). It won't compile, because in my application, Access does not seem to recognize the DAO object in the line: Dim rst As DAO.Recordset.

In fact, when I type "Dim rst As " and then check the available datatypes in the intellisense list, my database is giving me a reduced set of options compared to the Chapter 8 database from the book.

In the database from the book the list contains ... DAO, DataAccess Page, DataAccessPages, Database, Databases ... etc.
In my database the available list contains DataAccessPage and DataAccessPages, but not DAO, Database or Databases.

I'm working in Access 2002, which is the same as the book covers. There must be some configuration option at the database level which is set for the database in the book to give access to the DAO object but is not set for my database. However I haven't been able to find any clues either in the Access help files or with Google.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Formatting MS Access report with subreports and subforms in pivot views

GPF — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 11:45:12 -0800

Microsoft Access: Help me streamline (or completely automate) creating weekly reports that include tables and charts. I'm almost there, but I just can't wrangle the formatting. Is it me or is it Access? We keep statistics of our library's reference desk in an Access (2007, 2010) database I put together. It's a small enough DB that I can manage creating queries and reports on the fly as needed. I do, however, send around a weekly report that hits the highlights. Thus far, I've been exporting data to Excel and making tables and charts -- like this.

I've been trying to recreate that in the Access database by selecting a date on a form, and pushing a button that opens a PDF preview of a report that has subforms that open in pivot table and pivot chart views. But it comes out looking like this. Serviceable, but I need to:

- understand how reports create blank pages. I've been fiddling with the margins (and googling endlessly) but I can't get the preview to stop making blank pages.

- control column width (and other formatting issues) for the tables.

- show zero value hour/dates on the chart.

But, of course, I might be missing the forest for the trees. Is there another way I can accomplish this? Not only would I like to save myself some time with the weekly reports, but I'd like to make it so that my colleagues can do it themselves. Picking a date, pushing a button, and hitting print is about as sophisticated as it can get.

Why does Access change my pivot chart view?

BevosAngryGhost — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:37:06 -0800

A Microsoft Access issue: When I try to add a new variable to a pivot chart, the chart goes to a weird zoomed-in view. In this view, I can't add any new variables, nor see any trends. If I change to a different view, then back to pivot chart, everything appears as it should. Screenshots of before adding a field, after adding a field, and after changing views away and back again. My only guess is that this may be related to the number of time (x-axis) points, but I've worked with larger datasets before without encountering this issue. Any ideas about what's causing it, or a workaround?

Better Living Through Queries

bluejayway — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:54:13 -0800

Help me help myself- Please recommend books or websites that will help me to better understand SQL. I'm a learn-through-projects kind of person. My personal project of the week is playing around with the Lahman Baseball Database in MS Access. I'm a novice, but not a complete beginner. All of my simple queries are working out fine, but now that I'm beginning to write queries that calculate complex stats using multiple JOINs (is that bad?), I'm getting all kinds of screwy results.

I'd like to get a solid understanding of JOINS, nested JOINS, subqueries, etc. All of the examples I have found on the internet are either so simple that I don't think they'll scale or too complex and without good explanations.

Also, I am sticking with Access. It's what I have. I realize it's not great.

So, SQL guru's and DIY'ers, what are your recommendations?

Need some pointers on creating a simple inventory database

smoothvirus — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:02:42 -0800

Need help setting up a simple Access database. I'm trying to reconcile a bunch of inventory, which is all recorded in multiple Excel spreadsheets. I want to import all the Excel files into an Access database so I can match them up all at the same time. What I have is a master spreadsheet with the inventory for our organization. This master spreadsheet is updated every week and has about 50,000 lines.

I also have about a hundred other spreadsheets with items that were removed from our facility. I need to compare all these other spreadsheets against the master inventory to check that none of the removed items are still on it.

I know how to use the MATCH function in Excel to compare the spreadsheets one at a time but that's time consuming when I have around 100 files.

I do know how to import all the spreadsheets into Access as tables, but I'm lost on how to link the tables or run queries from there so I can get a report showing which property items need to be taken out of inventory.

thanks!!!