Graphing capabilities of MS access

[Brotherwarren]

Hi folks,

Please could someone take the time to answer a few beginners
questions.

I'm a teacher with responsibility for monitoring our school's progress
nationally and reporting to parents on their child's attainment.

We have been using an in-house excel application to keep records of
things such as exam resutls, effort grades, reading ages and so on.

We're now considering swapping this data over to access.

My biggest worry is that a lot of the information passed back to
parents is in graph form. Is it possible to construct line graphs,
including line of best fit, format the colours of individual data
points and lines of best fit and other things that excel can handle.

If it's not possible to do things directly in Access, what are the
chances of exporting data to excel, graphing it, and returning the
graph to access for a report? We have around 350 reports to prepare
and print at one time, and these go out on 10 occasions through the
course of a school year so speed is fairly important.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Thanks in advance for any advice or answers.

Tony

 

[Guest]

Hi Tony,
Access can handle your data and produce it in "Excel" type presentation -
the big advantage that Access has is that you can interrogate the data a
produce lots of reports of information that you hold but have not been able
to interrogate.
You can transfer the data from Excel to Access - there is a wizard that will
guide you through that - equally there is a wizard that will take data that
you select a present it in the Excel application. These 2 apps are highly
related and depending on the version you are running will determine the level
of automatic wizard work available.
The HELP system in both apps is very good and will guide you through your
requirements.
Good luck,
Frank

 

[Roger Carlson]

Actually, the graphing capabilities of Access are limited, IMO. I doubt if
it will give you the flexibility you're used to.

However, it is possible to:
1) compile one student's data in Access
2) create and format a graph in Excel
3) copy and paste the graph into a Word document, together with other
information from Access.
4) repeat for the next student.
all automatically using Office Automation from Access.

It's not easy or necessarily intuitive, but it can be done. I created an
app that created 650 reports each month, each of which had 3 Excel charts.

I don't have a sample database of this process, but I've always wanted to
make one. If you'll contact me directly (my email address is on my website,
see my sig below), I'll let you know when I've got a working sample for you
to download.

--
--Roger Carlson
MS Access MVP
Access Database Samples: www.rogersaccesslibrary.com
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