Is Access the right application?

[Guest]

I've been asked by a customer to develop some reports for them that we will
prepare quarterly. They may also have ad-hoc spur-of-the-moment reports that
come up and need to be completed. They could ask for a report on any given
product that they buy, during any given time frame. They may ask for
quantity, they may ask for dollar volume.

Our sales records are in an AS400 system. They can be downloaded into
Access (or Excel) for further manipulation. My sample download into Excel
gave me about 20,000 lines of data for one year.

I'd like to take the data and dump it into Access where I know I will have
more options on reporting. My question is that since I'm not building
various tables (like product code, description, price, etc.) is Access the
right application? All I would be doing is taking the data and creating
reports. I do not intend to build product tables for this work. So if I
download the data, it will appear in one table much like an Excel
spreadsheet.

Am I missing anything important before I go ahead and get Access here at
work to do this? I've used it before to do reports, but have always built my
own data tables as needed. In this case, I'll only be building reports, and
not really creating a comprehensive database.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

KK

 

[Albert D.Kallal]

They could ask for a report on any given

product that they buy, during any given time frame. They may ask for
quantity, they may ask for dollar volume.

The above is likely going to be one report. You would build a screen to
prompt for quality, start date/end date (the time frame), and dollar value.
You give the user those 4 prompts..and you likely covered 99% of the
requests uses will have. (any options they don't fill out simlyu will
default to "all").

I talk about building report prompt screens here:

http://www.members.shaw.ca/AlbertKallal/ridesrpt/ridesrpt.html

In 5+ years, those simple report prompt screens means they have NOT
requested that I build a new report....

is Access the
right application? All I would be doing is taking the data and creating
reports. I do not intend to build product tables for this work.

Access is really good this way. You can purchase a report ONLY system such
as crystal reports. It reporting ability is similar to ms-access, but lacks
the appcation development side that ms-access features.

Ms-access is nice since you can download the data into ms-access, or in fact
connect tot the "live" data on the mainframe..and not even transfer the
data.

If you do download the data..then you can write routines to process, and
massage the data before you report on it...

So, you might not use the development abilities of ms-access to build an
application..but those development tools do allow you more flexibility in
processing the data for repots..