Excel or Access - which one?

[WoodiE]

I'm getting ready to start on a project however I'm not sure if I should use Excel or Access for the project.

Here's what I've got and need to get done. I have ten employees (processors) that stats are kept on them (all of which are manually entered) such as the total amount of checks they've processed, how many they've done per hour, how many hours they've been logged in, how many errors they created, and at the end of all that I would average each area which would then give me their incenitive rate for that pay period. Ohh that reminds me, the stats would only be for a two week period, so once one pay period is up they start over. However the past weeks stats are still needed for record keeping.

I'm much more familiar with Excel and know this could easily be done in Excel however being that they need each past pay period is going to make this excel sheet huge and pretty much a pain to go through. So since past stats are needed I'm thinking a database would be nice, but have no clue how to start.

Another tricky part is the fact that the employees come and go so I've got to make it easy to add employees as needed.


Any ideas?



-Michael

 

[mr_bob]

excel would be the easiest thing to use for that type of thing and since you need to keep the past weeks you can just put each pay period on a different sheet

honestly i have no clue and don't think you can do what you need in excel

 

[Monkey Wrench]

Personally, Michael, I'd use Excel. It has pivot tables and form fields that, once you establish the template, you can add and remove employees, hide data to be easier to manipulate and the like.

If you have a rough idea as to how you'd like it to look, I can work on some ideas for you, be glad to! I'm fairly good at Excel, but I know where to go if I have questions.

 

[FastEddy]

Do you have the time for the learning curve for Access?
Its a POWERFUL tool but is *extremely complicated.

You can come up with an Excel spreadsheet for now and import the data if and when yo create a database in Access.

 

[Ryan with savage]

I agree with fasteddie, Excel is simpler and will get you up and running on this quicker, however Access is a database tool (which is what you need in the long run). As your needs for the underlying data increase its will be of far more use. Using the queries and tables is actually pretty simple when you get the hang of it.

 

[daakeung]

in the long run, access would be better. You can make tables of employees, past and present and create relationships etc. It's not that hard to learn and alot of formulae in the help docs.

 

[jetmechG550]

Last time I "used" Access or should say attempted to use Access I lost a monitor, I got so frickin' pissed I put my fist through it. I voting Excel

 

[olds97_lss]

I'm a database guy... how about oracle or ingress? :jk:

I wish I knew access. Then I could do stuff on my own. Installing ingress on a normal windows environment is annoying. We run it on solaris at work (suns version of unix) on big ass dells. We have in excess of 400 databases on 9 dell servers ranging from 5000 1M records to 1 million 1M records.

For what it sounds like you need, access (any database) would be best. It would allow for easy growth, reporting, queries...