Use Access for only one table?

V

VTM3

If you only have one table, and not several tables to relate together, is
Access the best program to use, or would Excel work better?

Thank you!
 
J

John W. Vinson

If you only have one table, and not several tables to relate together, is
Access the best program to use, or would Excel work better?

Thank you!
Click to expand...

Which is the better tool: a hammer or a crescent wrench?

It depends entirely on what you want to accomplish.

A one-table database would be very unusual, and I'd *guess* that Excel might
be more appropriate, but without knowing the nature of the task at hand I'd
keep that as a very tentative guess.
 
V

VTM3

John W. Vinson said:
Which is the better tool: a hammer or a crescent wrench?

It depends entirely on what you want to accomplish.

A one-table database would be very unusual, and I'd *guess* that Excel might
be more appropriate, but without knowing the nature of the task at hand I'd
keep that as a very tentative guess.
Click to expand...
I am working on a table that is an inventory of fungal cultures from various
part of a geographic area. Some of the fields I have include date, host
plant, what part of plant fungus came from, what county, has it been put in
long-term storage, etc. I don't really need to make other tables from some
of these fields. I just need a place to keep track of all our fungal
isolates.

Thank you!
 
A

Armen Stein

I am working on a table that is an inventory of fungal cultures from various
part of a geographic area. Some of the fields I have include date, host
plant, what part of plant fungus came from, what county, has it been put in
long-term storage, etc. I don't really need to make other tables from some
of these fields. I just need a place to keep track of all our fungal
isolates.
Click to expand...

Well, at first you might think you don't need extra tables. But some
of the values you describe may be best handled as lookup tables. Take
County for example. Don't you want to make sure that County is always
entered, and that it is always spelled consistently? An Access
structure can easily enforce these kinds of things, while it is
difficult to do with Excel.

Armen Stein
Microsoft Access MVP
www.JStreetTech.com
 
G

gglazer

VTM3 said:
I am working on a table that is an inventory of fungal cultures from various
part of a geographic area. Some of the fields I have include date, host
plant, what part of plant fungus came from, what county, has it been put in
long-term storage, etc. I don't really need to make other tables from some
of these fields. I just need a place to keep track of all our fungal
isolates.

Thank you!
Click to expand...

First, I would concur completely with what John wrote. That said, you may
wish to read over the following link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

If, after reading this, you still think you only need one table, then Excel
will probably be okay. The main question you have to ask yourself is whether
there are "many to one" relationships among complex structures of
relationships. I could envision a table setup like this (PK is primary key)

table County
Name (PK), lat, long, population, rural/urban/...

table Plant
genus, species, variety (PK triple)...

table Fungus
genus, specieds, variety (PK triple)...

table inventory
Foreign keys from the above tables, date, plant part, some discovery ID...

Then again, this might be overkill.

Hope this helps,

Glenn
 
J

John W. Vinson

I am working on a table that is an inventory of fungal cultures from various
part of a geographic area. Some of the fields I have include date, host
plant, what part of plant fungus came from, what county, has it been put in
long-term storage, etc. I don't really need to make other tables from some
of these fields. I just need a place to keep track of all our fungal
isolates.

Thank you!
Click to expand...

Well, there's five tables right there: HostPlants, Counties, StorageLocations,
PlantParts, and Isolates. I'd guess you also will want fungal genera and
species.

Or were you thinking of hand-typing in the county and the host plant each
time...!?
 
V

VTM3

Yes, that was very helpful. Thanks.

gglazer said:
First, I would concur completely with what John wrote. That said, you may
wish to read over the following link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

If, after reading this, you still think you only need one table, then Excel
will probably be okay. The main question you have to ask yourself is whether
there are "many to one" relationships among complex structures of
relationships. I could envision a table setup like this (PK is primary key)

table County
Name (PK), lat, long, population, rural/urban/...

table Plant
genus, species, variety (PK triple)...

table Fungus
genus, specieds, variety (PK triple)...

table inventory
Foreign keys from the above tables, date, plant part, some discovery ID...

Then again, this might be overkill.

Hope this helps,

Glenn
Click to expand...
 
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