Hi!
So I've just started with a company where my job is to manage a ton of data. I am new to Access (2010) and am completely impressed by all the awesome things it can do. However, I am running into some issues with knowing the best way to get my current data (which is all in Excel spreadsheets) into Access.
We are working with about 68 customers in 6 different focus areas (or areas of improvement). To make it easier for them, my company has not required them to enter all their data for each area into a centralized database. Instead, we are pulling reports (into Excel) from 3 different databases. The customers who are not currently submitting data to these databases are sending us Excel spreadsheets with their data (they send a seperate spreadsheet for each focus area). So you can see where my problem lies ... NOTHING is the in the same format. Even then the Excel spreadsheets look different from month to month (and customers submit a new, updated form every month with the current month and previous months) because the people managing the data before I came along changed the format a few different times and the customer has the ability to change them too.
Basically, I would really really really like to be able to just link the Excel files to my database, but I am struggling knowing how to do that with my data in so many different places and forms. Does anyone have any suggestions - can I even do what I want to do or is my only real option manual entry?? Again, I'm new to Access, so I'm not real familiar with all the ways to go about things, but I want to learn!! Thank you!
Sincerely,
one very frustrated human being