Excel or Access, advice please

[riaz]

Each year, I have to do tax returns for my father (in Pakistan, no suitable software available for this at a reasonable price). This ends up as having his entire year's transactions typed in manually onto various worksheets, which I then collate into reports for sending to the taxman.

I have laid out for him a workbook with locked formulas on the reports, so if everything works fine, he can month by month check the reports to his handwritten calcs to see if the two match and if not, reconcile the differences. Problem is that each year he finds new headings which did not exist previously, so I get involved long distance in entering his headings for him to be able to classify his data.

Only problem is that first all the data is written out by hand, then someone has to type them in, then I have to collate the lot, and finally look for diffs due to typos and the like.

I was thinking of setting up an input sheet for him, where each transaction would be input and analysed automatically, and then sent to a spreadsheet row or a database, from where I could pick it up for the reports.

Being an absolute novice at VBA in Excel, and never having used Access before, I though this might be an opportunity for me to learn one or the other. Given that the total transactions in a year run to about 3,000, what route would you recommend I take? Your reasons pro and con would also be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[RoryA]

If you have it, and you are doing a lot of manual data entry, I would use Access. It's geared towards making data entry forms much more than Excel is, and gives you much better control over the data being entered. It would also be more flexible as you can extract the data to Excel for analysis if required, or you can build queries and reports within the database.

 

[riaz]

Thank you for that, Rory. I got Access bundled with my copy of Office 2003 at home, but never had the will (courage?) to open it. I remember struggling to set up something in Access ver 1.0 when it came out as a replacement for Foxpro (now that was a neat piece of software), kept struggling, gave it up as a bad job and never went back.

I might have a play with it. Watch this space for cries of help.

Thanks again.

 

[RoryA]

Access 2003 is much better than Access 1.0! You get VBA to play with for starters.