Chapter 1. Introduction to AccessExcel Integration

Chapter 1. Introduction to Access/Excel Integration

Most business users understand Excel; its power and practically universal acceptance make it a key application to learn. While Excel is a powerful tool on its own, you can do a lot more with it when you add the power of a relational database. Whether you store your data in a simple Access database or link an Access database to your corporate data warehouse, you'll be able to do a lot of things more easily. A simple query combined with an Excel workbook can supply many of the benefits of expensive reporting packages using the tools you already have on your desktop.

Consider the following scenario. Your company stores sales information in a database, and each sales record carries an identifier that tells who sold the item. You also have a table of salespeople that tells what region they are in and who supervises them. Senior management wants to find out how each salesperson, sales manager, and region performs on a daily basis. Since they want to see the reports so frequently, it will be necessary to automate these reports as much as possible. This book will show you how to gather the information and build the reports, charts, and supporting details that are necessary to meet these business objectives.

If you consider the other uses of corporate data, you will begin to understand how useful these skills can be. Here is a short list of fairly common uses of data:

• Producing a monthly commission schedule

• Reporting sales by product, region, sales manager, or salesperson

• Doing financial reporting

• Producing invoices

• Performing analysis of data (average profit per sale, sales by month, etc.)

• Producing trend information to aid corporate planning

• Populating financial models and storing results

• Graphing financial and sales information

Building systems that can simplify and automate these tasks can make complex projects much simpler. Fortunately, you likely already have the tools you need to do this on your computer and just need to assemble the parts correctly.