I've got too many fields to create a Query or Report

[Guest]

I've been data gathering for an IT project in my office. I have recorded
absolutely everything about the user, the PC, and the applications on the PC.
I've recorded on an Excel workbook. There are 129 possible fields for each
user. I want to create a single report for each user, showing their details,
that they can review and keep. In Excel, using two columns, with the fields
in each row, I would produce 4 A4 pages for each user. I thought about doing
a pivot table, but it doesn't work because I want to select too many rows. I
then imported to Access, and attempted to create a report for each user. But
again I am prevented from creating a query or a report because I want to use
too many fields. Unfortunately, I can't cut any out and it's too complicated
to cut into chunks.

Can anyone think of another way of doing this?

 

[Guest]

In Access your first step should be to decompose the table into related
tables, each representing an entity type. You mention users, PCs and
applications, so you'd have a table for each of these entity types at least.
The relationship between PCs and Applications is almost certainly going to
many-to-many, i.e. each PC holds one or more applications and each
application is installed on one or more PCs. You would therefore model this
relationship with another table, PCApplications say, with columns such as
PCID and ApplicationID referencing the primary keys of the PCs and
Applications tables. The relationship between PCs and Users might also be
many-to-many (if any user uses more than one PC and if any PC is used by more
than one user), thus requiring a PCUsers table to model the relationship in
the same way.

You might well have other entity types, and consequently need more tables,
depending on what else you are recording.

Once you have the data into a set of related and correctly normalized tables
you can build a report based on Users and put subreports within it.
Similarly data input can be undertaken via forms and subforms.

As it happens I did produce a demo file a while ago showing how data
imported from Excel can be inserted into a set of normalized tables in Access
using a series of 'append' queries. Its not posted online, I'm afraid, but
I'd be happy to mail you a copy if you contact me at:

kenwsheridan<at>yahoo<dot>co<dot>uk

Ken Sheridan
Stafford, England