Hi, New to the forum and new to MS Access. I am looking for some advice on whether MS Access can do what I am wanting it to.
So, currently I have an Excel workbook set up with many macros for data collection, the workbook is effectively a vehicle inspection form, we have multiple engineers go out to site and perform a set of checks on a vehicle and record the results of each check within the inspection worksheet. There is a lot of information they need to gather.
Once they have completed the inspection, there is VBA set up to take all the data entered and move it to a seperate worksheet in the same workbook, which I will call DB for reference, in a specific format.
This is all done locally on the laptop/tablet the engineer has.
Once they are back online, the workbooks are copied to a central location (Dropbox) where another Excel workbook has VBA set up to import all the data form each workbooks DB sheet. Effectively creating a central Database of all the data from each inspection from each engineer.
This process works ok, but is a little clunky and I have been lokoig to move away from Excel to a proper database.
I've had a look around Access, and it seems like it woudl be possible to set up forms for capturing the data into the the database, but I am unsure on a few things.
1) If each laptop had Access running on it with the correct form set up so the data is captured locally, is it possible to synchronise the db from each laptop to a central DB hosted on our server? It needs to be this way as when the engineers are on site, most of the time they have no connection to the internet.
2) When setting up a form for data capture, how does the user run the form, do they need to open MS Access and then go to the form, or is it possible to have like an icon on the desktop that opens the form for them? so they effectively dont see MS Access, like can the form be run in a browser or similar scenario? The engineers we have are not IT literate and I need to keep it as simple for them as possible with any of the backend complications.
3) Can you create PDFs from forms to print out, as our engineers need to provide a PDF printout to the customer on site.
I'm trying to find out if this is possible to do, so I can determine if it is worth me learning MS Access. I am very tech savvy, and I can learn what I need to pretty quickly, but I've never had any exposure to MS Access previously, even though Ive workin in IT for 25+ years.
Many thanks in advance