access or excel

[Bassman]

hello,
I have been working on a excel spreedsheet to report weekly sales/
profits to my Boss. I have one sheet for inputing sales and profits
for several different sales types for each month. Currently the input
sheet has sale types sale/profit by rows and the months are in columns
and the sheet is for one full year. I use a seperate sheet to report/
compare the data. I change the data on the report sheet thru the cell
formulas that uses a parameter sheet for caluclating the selected
report month. The reporting works fine but I need to compare more
than one years input data. I want to trend sales by quarter and
compare to different quarters of past years and I want this to be
selected by the end user and It is getting too confusing. I have
never used access. I have used VBA in excel (macro) with a little
sucess. Would it be easier to put together this excel report by
pulling info from an access database? Where would I begin? Any advice
would be great.

 

[Bassman]

If it were me, I would consider storing the data in Access. As you have
discovered, trying to maintain so many dimensional slices of your data
in a cluster of worksheets becomes more difficult as time goes on and
reporting requirements become more complex.

Having said that, is not necessarily an easy proposition to reverse
engineer your data into a normalized structure. If you are not familiar
with this concept--and you mentioned you never used Access so I am
guessing you may not be--you should read up on that first. Understanding
the basics of normalized data structures is a must before embarking on
such a project. GIYF.

Even if you store your data in a database, whether you choose to analyze
it in Access or Excel or something else is another matter. IME, having
the normalized data in a database is often a good starting point for
analysis in a different application.

With all the doom and gloom out of the way, the /value/ you would expect
to gain by converting your data storage to a database is a highly
flexible handle on your data, including the ability to get relevant
report data quickly and wrapping controls around data quality. Whether
this value is worth the cost is for you to decide.

Best of luck!- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thank you for your time, do you recommend a good book with examples I
can start with. I want to learn.

 

[Bassman]

You are welcome. I do not know what good books might be, but I am sure
there are some. Hopefully someone else following this thread (or the
similar one in m.p.excel) will have a suggestion.

What I would suggest is to focus more on topics like relational database
design and not so much on an Access tutor. While the latter will
certainly address all the bells and whistles Access has to offer, they
may skate over the all-important underpinning of having a good data
design to work with.

And frankly, there's not all that much to know about the former, it just
takes some careful thought and practice. If you can get the first three
normal forms under your belt, you will be miles ahead of a lot of Access
users.

I understand> I will look for pointer on relational databases. I
wanted to head that direction anyways.
Thanks again for your reply I hope I can assist you some day.