enahs said:
I have an excel page I use as an invoice that I owuld like to keep what
is the best way to link certain cells to a database that does not
currently exist should i use excel or access?Can someone point me in
the right direction on the best way to accomplish this would like to be
able to scroll through invoices with just the data changing.
You are asking a very complicated question. There is no simple
answer. For example:
Maybe what you really want is to ditch the Excel sheet and go
with an Access app entirely.
Maybe you don't really need a database as such, but just a few
carefully written macro routines in an Excel workbook.
Maybe what you need is an Access back end to hold the data
and do some database functionality, and an Excel front end
to provide the interface.
Maybe what you need is the previous, but with an Access front
end instead of an Excel front end.
And several other possibilities. Since the database does not even
exist, you have a lot of design effort in front of you before you
decide how to continue.
My suggestion: Sit down and prepare a written spec for what you
need your appilcation to do. Write it in terms of the job you want
it to do. (As for example "record information per order.") Do not
write this spec in terms of computer jargon or computer terms.
(That is avoid such things as "make an Excel sheet.")
Include such things as the information you need on each invoice,
how many distinct kinds of invoice there will be, do you want
to be able to search on customer name, phone number,
or other data, do you want to sort on value of invoice, whether
the invoice is paid, when it is due, etc. etc.
Once you have this spec, start working on limits and expectable
ranges and such. For example: Do you expect 1 customer
(you mentioned invoice), 100 customers, a million, how many?
Do you expect each customer to have a few purchases (say
less than 5) or thousands or millions.
This front end to your design task should be as complicated as
is reasonable for the size of your project. If you are making some
small thing for your home-basement business, and you expect
a couple invoices per week, then you should only spend a few
hours on the spec. If it is for a larger office, then you should be
spending more time on it, being more careful, maybe getting
some help from more experienced designers.
Once you have all that, then you can decide what to do as far
as implementation. Indeed, once you have all that, it may be
far more clear what you need. For example: If you expect
ten or twenty customers in total, and each one with one or
two invoices, you could probably do just a table in Excel,
and a few macros to scroll up and down. If you expect a few
hundred to a few thousand customers, with maybe an invoice
or two each per month, you pretty much need some kind of
database or things get very messy. If you start to get into
10s of thousands of customers with several invoices each
per week, you start to get to the limits of what an Access
database could deal with, and maybe want to think about
a more powerful database back end.
Socks
