General Question about Access+Excel

[tuckerharris]

Hello Mr. Excel Community!

I have a general question about what MS Access may be able to do for me and my data needs. I am very new to Access although I have created some company databases in a few of my classes for product/customer tracking.

I currently have an Excel workbook created which tracks the WIN/LOSS/PUSH results for predictions made on sports betting outcomes. I have to manually input the predictions made by each individual and then manually input the outcomes once they are determined. After inputting this data manually, the records become calculated automatically.

Instead of manually inputting the predictions, I wanted to see if I could create a form and embed it onto my webpage for users to input their predictions. Once they input their predictions on the form, it would upload to my Access database (or directly into Excel if possible?). The form would also need to pull in current data such as Teams and their against the spread (ATS) line with which to make predictions on.

Is this something MS Access could do? Do you see any potential benefits to using Access given what I'm trying to do?

Thanks so much for your advice! Any and all feedback is appreciated!

 

[tuckerharris]

Looks like this has received a lot of views, but no responses . Perhaps this a is a dumb question...

 

[Micron]

I'm guilty of looking but not answering - because web interaction with a database is outside of my expertise. Been working in Access a long time, but not to that extent. Might be beyond most people in this forum too. I can visualize linking to a bunch of spreadsheets sent to you by others, and then working with that in Access, but not only is it not what you asked for, Excel is better at crunching numbers anyway. You might be further ahead creating a Userform in Excel as far as that goes, but again, not what you want.
I know Access can publish a db to the web or SharePoint, but you're looking to get the info going the other way. So your question is not dumb; it's just that we're not supposed to suggest you post your question to an Access forum where you might get more help, so I'm not going to do that. If you do post this question in various places, do come back here and post a link to it/them so that kind people here do not waste time re-inventing the wheel you are working on somewhere else.

 

[Kyle123]

Whilst not Access or Excel, you may get some mileage in google forms; you can create a form and have it input directly into a google sheet (one row per entry) - you could download/import this anywhere you like

 

[tuckerharris]

I'm guilty of looking but not answering - because web interaction with a database is outside of my expertise. Been working in Access a long time, but not to that extent. Might be beyond most people in this forum too. I can visualize linking to a bunch of spreadsheets sent to you by others, and then working with that in Access, but not only is it not what you asked for, Excel is better at crunching numbers anyway. You might be further ahead creating a Userform in Excel as far as that goes, but again, not what you want.
I know Access can publish a db to the web or SharePoint, but you're looking to get the info going the other way. So your question is not dumb; it's just that we're not supposed to suggest you post your question to an Access forum where you might get more help, so I'm not going to do that. If you do post this question in various places, do come back here and post a link to it/them so that kind people here do not waste time re-inventing the wheel you are working on somewhere else.

Whilst not Access or Excel, you may get some mileage in google forms; you can create a form and have it input directly into a google sheet (one row per entry) - you could download/import this anywhere you like

Thanks for the response guys! I was just looking for any advice or feedback regarding what I'm trying to do. I'm debating if I should spend my time creating an Access db or if I should go a different route. I'm going to look into GoogleForms and see what that has to offer. I'll add further details to this post when I come across them.

 

[xenou]

I was trying to avoid answering because the actual howto on this is maybe more than can be explained properly. But the google forms suggestion is a good idea - probably the easiest too. Hosted web pages such as the kind you can buy for quite cheap and have your own website will generally support an Access database for storage. They will also generally provide a MySql database for the same purposes (both kinds for no extra cost). But you might need to get some tutorials on actually building such a web page.

Also Access in the cloud would work (which Microsoft has been making easier in recent versions of Access) - possibly Office 365 is already set up for this since it's cloud-based.