I am moving up to the very top of the spreadsheet here and as you can see once again we have about 17 vendors listed in there. One of the names I am going to pick out is CSD Food services. This vendor name, I am going to scroll back down at the bottom here, as you see is listed here, scroll a little bit further, again we have another invoice listed for CSD Food Services there and I think there are a couple of more down here.
We have one here, a credit invoice and we have another invoice. Now I have been actually typing in CSD Food Services for each one of these Vendor, Name, Invoices. What happens if CSD Food Services changes their name? I am going to have to change every spot that I see CSD Food Services listed in this pretty much jumbled mess of Vendor Information and report groups and Invoice Totals. If you see yourself entering the same information over and over again its probably time to move into Access. You will also start to outgrow simple list in Word and Excel when you begin to ask complex questions. Suppose for example we want to find out how many invoices we bought from vendors within one particular city, within say February of 2007.
This is going to be very hard to find in Excel if you had all this information in Word it would be even more difficult to discover all the invoices saved and created within that particular month. Other complex questions you might ask, how many vendors are outside of our own city? Again with Excel you are going to have a difficult time answering these types of questions. We have up near the top all of our cities because we have just a few vendors listed here, we could easily count, even with Excel 2007's expanded million plus records, what happens if you have more than a million vendors? And if you are going to be searching for information it’s going to be very tedious.
So this is the time where you need to move to Access. Another reason you might need to move to Access is when you need to share data. Access is designed to be shared by many users entering data, viewing data, running calculations and printing reports. Excel simply does not have this capability. Don't get me wrong. Excel is a great number crunching analysis tool and serves a specific purpose. However when you are ready for a database, Access is the place to be.
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