Excel-like interactive report

[MG]

I'm an Access beginner with a question about interactive reports. I've
been asked to create something that resembles an Excel spreadsheet. For
the most part it consists of columns of values pulled from the DB (name,
empID, hourly rate, etc.) with one of the columns user-editable (hours
worked). When the user alters this column's cells, their values are used
to update/recalculate totals in other cells (e.g. total hours, total
earned).

Is this a common undertaking in Access? Can I do it with a report, or
would I need to manually create an interactive GUI or Excel object? (My
background is in Java, so VBA coding isn't a problem.) Any push in the
right direction is appreciated, thanks!

MG

 

[SA]

MG:

Access reports are static documents. They can not be edited. The offer a
snapshot of the data from the database based on the underlying query.

If the user has Access on their machine (or the run time version), you'd
want to use a form, where the user can input data and update the database.
Alternately, if the user's don't generally have Access you can use Excel and
have them enter data in a spreadsheet and import that into your database,
provided however that the rows and columns with data are contiguous like a
flat file.