dk said:
For someone who claims to 'hate Access' you still seem willing to give crappy advice to anyone who will listen. This attitude is typical of someone who's used to Excel and then gets in a strop because Access doesn't work the same way. Do you seriously think you could create a report in Excel that includes the usual things (subtotals, nice formatting, etc) which is maintainable and would allow amendments to be easily made? A total moron could use the report wizard and even tidy up afterwards (I've seen it with my own eyes!) What's the problem? (This is in reference to your 'reports,etc stink' remark in one of your ramblings).
Well granted I was exagerating a touch. And more trying to get a rise of out Mark than you, but the advice while pointy, isn't so crappy in my estimation.
Of course I can create reports in Excel from an Access database that
1) Meet your requirements
2) Are more functional than Reports in Access.
So yes, seeing is believing, I do it all the time, and wouldn't have posted as such if the case was otherwise. This is where my advice is better than that of the approach followed by morons, as you put it. Granted, not as straight-foward, but I'm taking my own medicine on this one and to follow your choice advice with the next scenario has proven to be very crappy indeed. Consider the following scenario. 100 MB database full of detail. I need to create 200 unique queries, periodically, and sometimes I want to mix-match the queries, then distribute them all by e-mail to different recipients. What good does a report do me here? Zippo, it's static, how are you going to distribute it? And how is the recipient gonna cut it and work with the data? They're not, very bad news indeed because they have their own spreadsheets and dbs to work with the data and you end up with duplicative efforts to re-key all of this stuff. So what do I do? Exactly what my
crappy advice was, push every one of them to an Excel File and programmatically format each outputted report, fully complete with images (which I convert to a byte array and pass to Excel from a form (code's on the board)), subtotals, pretty colours, the whole nine yards... Data reports are nicer and more functional in Excel, in my opinion, period. It's like someone sending me data in a pdf, I can do nothing with it until I convert to Excel, then I can do anything, push to Access, analyze, etc... I don't get that with a static, drawn up report. I don't care for them based on experience. What do you do with a report? Print it and file it, because it's useless. Turns out to be the medicine I prefer.
Yes, there are some things which could be implemented in a better way. Howvever, your 'doesn't work like it should (buggy) comment' intrigues me. Can you clarify this with some examples?
Sure:
bug. Michael states it's not an Access issue, but it is an Access object model issue.
Obviously DAO wasn't cutting it, so M.S. adopted ADO, which simply convolutes the use of Access even futher.
There's definintely a problem with a converted '97 database I have, where it double counts on a select distinct query I have, even after implimenting the Val() function. The jury-rig fix was preposterous, use a min() or max() function, that's not intuitive... I gave up caring as to what the problem is, because it occurred to me that it's crazier than fiction.
There's more bugs with Access, I've just been fortunate not to have identified them all. Excel has some too, but it seems to be much more user friendly in terms of data manipulation, and you need not agree.
By the way, I typed "i hate excel" into Google and there were a few hits. If we're going to use that logic then I think MS Word will be the winner
My attitude is that of someone who's pushed the software and who's been in turn underwhelmed from time to time. I still recommend it's use, it's better than Excel for certain things, I just don't think
data reports are one of them. And, I still think Visio's the winner in my estimation.
