Excel or Access Help

[Annekah]

Hello all,

I need to make a database for some research I am doing and I need to know the best way to do it, as in, should I use Excel or Access and how exactly I can use either to create graphs of my data.

I need to create a database on my research into child interactions with therapists. Each record will need to include the usual information such as name of child, name of therapist, date and so on. But then also it will need to house the data I collect, and this is the part I am having trouble visualising how to do.

I will have time intervals set up, for the interactions that occur in a 30 second time frame, such as 0:30, 1:00, 1:30, 2:00... so on for about 20 minutes. Now comes the tricky part. For each 30 second interval I need to record what happens, and to do that I have 4 catagories of what can happen, and in each category either 0 things can happen, 1 or 2, up to a maximum of 8 things can happen. Such as i can say who is talking, and what they are talking about. The information is all in codes, not actual words, and used over and over.

I just cant wrap my head around how I am going to go about saving this information in either excel or access, mostly because for each 30 second interval, i need to record information for 4 seperate catergories, and each catagory can hae multiple items, and those items are codes, not numbers.

Eventually I will also have to do charts and graphs based on the information I collect, but I will worry about that later. Does anyone have any idea on how I could go about doing this for my project?

 

[Demon10000]

Just remember, excel is a spreadsheet -- not a database. If you're collecting and organizing data, you should use a database.

With that said, for simple data excel works perfect. However, it sounds like you're collecting something a little more "advanced" and you should probably use a database.

 

[Virtus]

You need a database for this - Access will work great. You need something like:

tblChild
ChildID
Firstname
Lastname
etc...

tblTherapist
TherapistID
TFirstname
TLastname
etc....

tblSession
SessionID
ChildID
TherapistID
SessionDate
etc...

This will get you a database that tracks children, therapists and their sessions. To track the details of the interaction you would need more tables like:

tblInteractions
InteractionID
SessionID
CategoryID
WhatHappenedID
InteractionTime

tblCategory
CategoryID
CategoryCode
CategoryDefinition

tblWhatHappened
WhatHappenedID
WhatHappenedCode
WhatHappenedDefinition

So each each session can actually have an unlimited number of interactions that consist of a Category and a WhatHappened. You can use more tables and code to further group everything.

This is a very easy database, but if you don't know databases you should hire someone who does.