User Friendly Interface for MS Access 2010

[Lou_Reed]

I have been building and working on this database now for several months. It seems now I must get serious about it and by that I mean to allow someone to use it who know little to nothing about a database.

The bottom line here is simplicity. I am sure this has occurred before, but maybe not in the way I am going to explain it.

I have been requested to make a dashboard line interface where someone can ask a simple question and get an answer.

For example my database contains a lot of info on contracts and each one's expiration date.



Okay, but what if someone wanted to know what contracts will expire in the next two months. I could find out (I created this db),
but what if they know very little about the db and they just wanted to know what contracts will expire in the next two months.

How would they formulate that? How would I set it up so such questions could be answered with a minimal knowledge of db and almost no know of
this db in particular.

Also. in my organization we do a lot of traveling (its a tough job but someone has to do it).

If each enter their travel plans before they leave (say date of departure and date of return, where they going and who they will meet). Can an amateur
find that out with just some simple input into this db?


I know these questions sound simple (really they are not), but the are the ones brought up to me today at the db progress meeting.


Any help appreciated.


Respectfully,


Lou_Reed




I also would like to interface with MS Excel so a lot of input data could from an Excel spreadsheet.

I know that these are not questions whose answers can be found in the tutorials.

Nevertheless, that I where I am now. I believe that anyone with 6 months experience can
use this but most users would not even have a weeks experience.

Any help appreciated. Thanks in advance.


Respectfully,


Lou_Reed

[John_G]

If by "dashboard line interface" you mean that your users would be able to just type in a question in free text and get an answer, then what you want to do will be extremely difficult indeed, requiring a lot of thought and code.

For us humans, it's often not a problem, because our brains are wired for that sort of thing. Computers are different.

Take your question "Which contracts expire in the next two months?". Think about what a computer has to do to figure out what that means.

- Is asking "how many" the same as "which"? for some people, it is
- they might type "contract" instead of "contracts"
- they could use "end" or "terminate" instead of "expire"
- does "next two months" mean in the next 60 days, or does it mean May and June?

I think you get the idea - even a very simple question can be a lot of work to unscramble.

What I would suggest is that you canvass your user community and your management to determine what the commonest questions might be, and develop a form based query entry. Properly done, that can be made quite general, where if users didn't enter data in a field, it wouldn't be part of the query.

User don't need to know access or the database to make it work.

As time goes on, you can develop different forms for different types of data.

But as for a "dashboard line interface" - I don't think so.