Excel or Access?

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WoodiE

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 28, 2003
Messages
231
I'm getting ready to start on a project however I'm not sure if I should use Excel or Access for the project.

Here's what I've got and need to get done. I have ten employees (processors) that stats are kept on them (all of which are manually entered) such as the total amount of checks they've processed, how many they've done per hour, how many hours they've been logged in, how many errors they created, and at the end of all that I would average each area which would then give me their incenitive rate for that pay period. Ohh that reminds me, the stats would only be for a two week period, so once one pay period is up they start over. However the past weeks stats are still needed for record keeping.

I'm much more familiar with Excel and know this could easily be done in Excel however being that they need each past pay period is going to make this excel sheet huge and pretty much a pain to go through. So since past stats are needed I'm thinking a database would be nice, but have no clue how to start.

Another tricky part is the fact that the employees come and go so I've got to make it easy to add employees as needed.


Any ideas?



-Michael
 
Dietrich,

Could you go into a lil detail? What would be required to do thsi in Access? Is this something that could be done in one table or would I need more then on table for all the info?



Thanks,

-Michael
 
maybe you can setup some of your tables in excel, and then import them into Access. I agree that you'll probably want to maintain it in Access, but you could use Excel to do some of the startup to get you going.
 
On one hand, Access does more and lets you build an attractive interface. On the other hand Excel files will still be accessable in later versions of Microsoft Office.

If you don't mind a suggestion of a third option, OpenOffice comes with a database program and a spreadsheet. OpenOffice also uses an open file format, so it will likely be supported well into the future becasue of the "near immortal" nature of open-source.
 
Langford,

The entire office has already paid and are using Office 2000 - converting them to Open Office isn't an option, but thanks for the suggestion.



-Michael
 
to add another option - since it seems this is database-like

PYTHON

code a little program (wouldn't take much) that deals with the database.

ACCESS for such a small amount of data seems overkill, while with PYTHON there are difference methods of storing the data.

For this amount I would do it in a PICKLE file

the result would be a command-line program, but doesn't take much to wrap a simple GUI around that
 
eeyrjmr said:
to add another option - since it seems this is database-like

PYTHON

code a little program (wouldn't take much) that deals with the database.

ACCESS for such a small amount of data seems overkill, while with PYTHON there are difference methods of storing the data.

For this amount I would do it in a PICKLE file

the result would be a command-line program, but doesn't take much to wrap a simple GUI around that
Click to expand...


I've never even used Python thus this is would not work, thus the reason it must be either excel or access.



-Michael
 
Access would probably be the best way to link groups of data to individual employees. And since your manually inputting the data for now you shouldn't have too much of a problem if you set up your tables to best suit your needs.
 
Excel is not a database system. Considering the long term nature if what you want, using it wouldn't be a good idea at all.

One option to get it up and running efficently is to contract hire someone to build you the Access database and required forms. If they don't spend a week trying to analyse your buisness requirements and can't draw you a schema, hire someone else. There are a lot of people out there who say they know how to build a database, but they really just know how to use Access or some other DBMS. (I am really more of the latter sadly.)
 
Access would be better, but the learning curve can be almost vertical. If the data set isn't going to be very large (10 emplyees x 26 pay periods a year is only 260 lines) excel will be much simpler for you to get set up. If you wanted to track each check that each processor handles, it'd probably be too much for excel after a short while.

 
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