Comments on: Excel and Access integration and auto-population

By: randym

randym — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:01:41 +0000

I should add that once you figure out all the steps and get the procedures in place, you can have a form with a button that will do all the work for you. I do want to point out that this may be somewhat complicated if you don’t have much experience using Access.

One thing to keep in mind is to make sure that you don’t load duplicate data and maybe provide a way to “reload” the data. Meaning have an identifier for the imported data that indicates the “batch” of records loaded. I like to use date and time in format
yyyymmddhhnnss. This way you can easily remove all records loaded in a batch and reload.

By: randym

randym — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 14:55:40 +0000

You could import as often as you want. It depends if any data needs “fixing” for how much you want to fix at one time. If there a never any probems with the data coming in, then you could maybe just do it once a month. It depends how often your pivot tables needs to be updated.

For how to merge. To get started, there will be some trial and error on what is the best way to import into Access. You may link the Excel spreadsheet so it looks like a table in Access or you may have the user save the speadsheet as a .csv file and you could import the .csv file into a “work” table.

If all seven sites have the exact stucture, you could have one link or one import by saving the source document as the same name. If you need to track each sites data, the spreadsheet should have some sort of identifer in it or you need to attach a site identifer to it when you import the data.

If the sites have different structures, you may need to have more than one link or .csv import structure for each type of file coming in.

Once you do that, you can use queries to manipulate the data into a master table. Then you could use Excel to link to that master table and do all of your pivot reports. Access can do pivot reports, but I found that Excel may be more end user friendly especially if the end user works with Excel alot and wants to created many different reports.

By: sm6hans

sm6hans — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:57:40 +0000

Thanks Randym.

I have practically no experience with Access. You say it can be done.

Whats the best way to import data – on a weekly basis – being sent from 7 different sites?

How can I merge spreadsheets with different columns into a master spreadsheet with all the columns?

By: randym

randym — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:46:57 +0000

Its hard to tell what is wrong by just saying it isn’t working well. But, in theroy, what you want to do will work. I have done applications similar to this. I used Access to import data from spreadsheets, .csv files and other RDBMS tables and pulled them all together in one master table. Then I still used Excel to link to the Access database which then has multiple pivot sheets depending on the type of output desired. Again, your description is too vague to tell you what is not working correctly.

By: sm6hans

sm6hans — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:54:30 +0000

I thought I could use MS Access to create forms, have a query auto-populate a table, and output the data in a pivot table, but it hasn’t been working very well.

Any suggestions will be much appreciated!