Need HELP creating form

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tony
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T

Tony

I have limited Excel experience so I need some help. A friend of mine wants me to create a form
using Excel. He is a horse trainer. To simplify things, I want to create a main form that would
include fields for Horse's name, Owner(s) names and contact info, Vet, Races, etc. I can handle the
creation of the fields on the main page.

What I would like to happen is after the data is input, it is saved in a database so that it can be
called back up when needed. Is this a difficult thing to do? It seems it would be easy but things
arent always as easy as they seem. Are there any free templates for this already out there?

Thanks for your time.

Tony
 
Tony,

For starters, it might be easier to set up your horse table in a sheet, then use Data - Form
for the form to enter and edit the records.

Put headings at the top of each column (horse's name, DOB, height, whatever). Use one row
for the headings. You should set it up for one horse per row. Don't succumb to the
multiple-row layout temptation. Excel's tools (including the Data Form) won't be available
then. Keep them all in one sheet -- one big table. Ideally, you'd have a separate table
for owners with all the owner-related information, and have only one field (column) in your
horse table to indicate the owner's name for the particular horse. You may wonder why I'm
recommending these things, but you'll be glad later if you take this to heart.

Then at some point you'll wish you'd used Access instead of Excel -- Excel is a good
analysis tool, but not a good data base program. Much less work to do stuff for a project
like this. No worries -- it's easy to move the data to Access when you decide to do that.
--
Earl Kiosterud
www.smokeylake.com

Note: Some folks prefer bottom-posting.
But if you bottom-post to a reply that's
already top-posted, the thread gets messy.
When in Rome...
 
Tony,

For starters, it might be easier to set up your horse table in a sheet, then use Data - Form
for the form to enter and edit the records.

Put headings at the top of each column (horse's name, DOB, height, whatever). Use one row
for the headings. You should set it up for one horse per row. Don't succumb to the
multiple-row layout temptation. Excel's tools (including the Data Form) won't be available
then. Keep them all in one sheet -- one big table. Ideally, you'd have a separate table
for owners with all the owner-related information, and have only one field (column) in your
horse table to indicate the owner's name for the particular horse. You may wonder why I'm
recommending these things, but you'll be glad later if you take this to heart.

Then at some point you'll wish you'd used Access instead of Excel -- Excel is a good
analysis tool, but not a good data base program. Much less work to do stuff for a project
like this. No worries -- it's easy to move the data to Access when you decide to do that.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info Earl. I would have done it the way you described except there may be one
complication. Some horse have 10 or more owners. How would I address that? Eash owner's contact info
would need to be available. If it could be the way I want, the user would be able to call up any
horse's sheet or any owner's sheet. The most important thing is that there is one centralized page
were all the fields are (horse name, vet, owners, age, etc. Then, with the click of a button, it
would send the info to a horse or owner page and the fields would clear themselves.

Does that make sense?

Tony
 
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