Hello all,
I apologize in advance for my ignorance, but I have a very general question I am hoping someone can help me with.
I've done a bunch of reading and started to put together the structure of my database, but I'm starting to wonder if access is even a good tool for the problem I am trying to solve.
What I have now is an excel template (with ~12 worksheets) that many regional offices use to enter in some lease data, from which the excel sheet creates a rental schedule and does a whole ton of calculations on that data. Some are NPV calculations, some are yields etc etc.
Eventually, I would like to:
1) Enable users to fill out one of these templates, and save the data to the database (Just the inputs? All the data? My reading suggests just the inputs)
2) Use the database to produce one of these templates for any lease in our system (shouldn't be hard, from what I've read)
3) Sum up calculations from this template for many records (eg. if a tenant has many leases, what is the NPV of all of those leases, or what is the total NPV for all tenants)
Although I have never really used Access, the reading I did suggested that it would be a good candidate to help me do these things.
Here is my concern: my understanding is that access is not really designed to perform the types of calculations I need for #3. As long as I have the inputs (from Access) I will have no problem using them in the excel version, but does it make sense to use Access given that I may need to somehow be switching back and forth to get the info I want for my various reports? Can these even be done? Am I underestimating Access?
I am very comfortable writing macros in VBA for excel, so if that's the solution, that is no problem. I assume what I need for #1 and #2 is a macro to arrange the inputs from the excel sheet into a format that can easily be dropped into access tables and vice versa.
I hope this is the right place to post, and that my question makes sense. If not, please let me know.
Thanks in advance,
Mick