How to make Access more accessible for non-users

[devonlatour]

I'm a new Access user and I'm trying to create a database that allows a user (with zero Access experience) to query for info.

Is there anyway to do this without making them user the Query Builder tool? It would be ideal if this person could enter data into a form, select boxes and specify date/amount ranges.

Thanks.

[cbende2]

Yes, this is possible. What kind of fields will they be selecting from? Dates? Text? Both?

You say select boxes, what do you mean by that?

[devonlatour]

The spreadsheet I imported has several values from which they'll be selecting:

Product A, B, C, D, etc: Yes or No
City
State
Date of Purchase
Amount of Purchase

It would also be nice to have a sub-menu for the products. For example, if the user is looking for someone who purchased "Product A", having the option to select "A-Feature1,"A-Feature2,"... etc.

So a query example would be to find a customer that bought Product A within the past month and spent over $1,000 in Chicago.

Make sense?

I apologize for sounding so elementary on this - Access is a whole new world to me

[devonlatour]

I've attached an example of what I'm working with. So if a user queries for a customer that bought Product A in Chicago, it should return the customer ID, name, phone and all other data points in that row.

[John_G]

Your file structure is going to make your task difficult. The data is not properly normalized (very typical in Excel spreadsheets), in that you have repeating information groups (purchases) in each row, and the full customer data must be repeated for each purchase. How do you handle the case where one customer buys more than one product at a time?

Writing queries in MS Access for un-normalized data often produces nothing but headaches.

You need to reformat your data into (at least) two tables: Customers and Purchases, with the two being related on the Customer_ID.

Once you do that, writing the queries will be a lot easier.