Looking for ideas on setup on database/structure via excel

[ryansapp]

I have (attached) a spreadsheet that our repair personnel are giving our customers once they have made a repair to a pump. It includes a multitude of different information categories, and not in particularly great order. Having said that, as business expands, I'd love to be able to have all this data housed in a database that we can go to and filter/find a particular customer, a particular threshold of repairs that fell within a special category, given time frame, etc. etc. etc.

Does anyone have any insight for a proper approach on how to tackle this long term? The last thing I want to do is start creating a separate folder for each customer and record a new excel file dropping it into that folder each time we do a pump repair.

FYI: I'm working in a Mac environment, have Excel 2011 and FileMaker Pro. My experience with Excel is fairly decent, and Access fairly decent as well but FileMaker Pro unfortunately I haven't worked with much at all.


https://www.dropbox.com/s/3bdmr8hi1rurgu7/midcon pump repair sheet graphed.xlsx?dl=0

 

[FDibbins]

cannot access your file (not allowed to), but my biggest advice would be to FIRST design your input sheet, and to have as much on there as you can. You can/should have additional sheets for your standard data/tables for tasks, time, costs, materials reqd etc. but do NOT think first on what your output needs to be - more often than not, that output-first thinking results in a messed up data-input sheet.

Think along the lines of...
what are all my regular inputs
what will be the easiest way to enter that
how can I make the data entry as fool-proof as possible

 

[alansidman]

here is a white paper on data base design.

http://sbuweb.tcu.edu/bjones/20263/access/ac101_fundamentalsdb_design.pdf

 

[Smitty]

If your repair folks have internet access I'd consider using a survey with the Excel Web App. It feeds to a hidden workbook that only you can see, and you can analyze the results from there.