Kick start, please....

[Joskin]

Hello Gurus,
I think this is really simple, but I don't know where to start
I have a rain gauge in the garden & collect rainfall figures for the
Environment Agency. These figures are sent monthly on a pre-printed card -
I have no idea what they do with them !
But for personal & local interest, I have also kept these records on an
Excel spreadsheet since 1989, but I am now considering using a simple Access
2007 database instead, so that data queries/comparisons would be easier &
more versatile.
I need to record just one figure for each month of the year, eg 122.4mm in
March 2009; 145.3mm in April 2009 etc.
So, should my table have:
rows for the "Years" and columns for the "Months" or
rows for the "Months" and columns for the "Years" ?
The kind of output would be:
"Yearly totals from 1990 to 1999"
"November readings from 1995 to 2005"
"Wettest September, 2000 to 2009"
etc.
It would seem to come down to whether there should be many records (years)
of twelve fields (months), or whether it is better to have just 12 records
(months) of ever increasing fields (years).
Your advice please?
Thank you for reading,
Joskin

 

[Philip Herlihy]

Use the built-in Access "Date/Time" field type. This stores a number with
integral and fractional parts representing (respectively) date and time.
There are numerous functions which help you interpret and manipulate these
values. Have a look at this article:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA011102181033.aspx
Try and do this any other way and you're swimming against the current.

So, I figure you'd have a table which had fields for the Date/Time of the
observation, and the value. If all the values in your spreadsheet are in
the correct format you can link or import the spreadsheet into Access. Once
you have the data correct, you can run queries which display the time values
in different ways. The Format function (see help) will convert a raw
(numeric) date value to a string (you can also specify custom formats -
search Help for "custom format date" for a list of all the various codes you
can use). Once you have your query displaying the fields in the formats you
like, you can group by those fields, so you could group by year and then
month easily enough.

Once you get the hang of using the Format function in a query, and the Group
By queries, you'll find this all gets quite easy. Read up about Queries in
Help, including how to use Expressions to create a calculated field in a
query.

HTH

Phil, London

 

[Joskin]

Thanks for the pointers, Phil.
Once again you have introduced me to a whole new area of my ignorance - last
time it was 'normalisation' in an animal database .
I'll look into this now that you've given me a starter.
Regards,
Joskin, Dartmoor

 

[Philip Herlihy]

We're all learning here! I learn a lot by lurking here and answering the
ones I think I'm able to!

Phil

 

[Jeff Boyce]

Don't we all!

Jeff B.

We're all learning here! I learn a lot by lurking here and answering the
ones I think I'm able to!

Phil