Hello savemore-ga,
Thanks for this elaborate yet often-encountered question by those
attempting to fit general software (such as MS Office) into their
daily tasks. I often deal with companies who are completely lost as
far as coming up with efficient, standardized methods of handling and
manipulating their information. You also seem to fall into that
category.
Given that you already have the entire MS Office XP suite, I strongly
recommend using its programs together to integrate information and
generate reports in the manner that you mentioned earlier.
Specifically, I believe that you would benefit greatly from
incorporating the power of MS Access XP into your current process of
manually creating payment reports.
Since it is somewhat difficult to provide technical details and
instructions through this medium, I will approach the problem by
taking snippets of your question and demonstrating how you can use
specific functions of MS Access to make your life easier.
"I currently receive a lot of information, in this example data in
Microsoft Excel 2002...that relate to pay schedules"
With MS Access:
Since I am assuming the original information that you receive is in
tabular form (ie. columns define a specific type of data and each row
represents a new entry containing each type of data), you can easily
import this data into a new or existing MS Access database. This not
only allows you to keep all your information in one place, but by
using Queries in Access, you are now able to ask almost any imaginable
question about the data. Keep in mind that this information is now
being "stored", and although you can see it directly, you probably
won't need to deal with it directly any longer.
"I must separate and create separate payment reports"
With MS Access:
There is no longer any reason to manually seperate the data, because
since it is being stored as a database you can run a simple query to
obtain only the information you want. An example would be: "Return all
records for sub-agent 123 for the month of June"; of course you can't
yet write it in plain English so it takes so time to understand how to
create queries like this.
As far as creating the reports themselves, from the question I am
getting the feeling that all the reports you make are of the same
format (which is a good thing!). In Access, what you can do is use the
Reports feature to create what you could think of as a template report
where you define all the borders and so forth that you were talking
about in the question. Now, any time you want to create a report of
that format, you just need to define the information you want in that
report (using a query) and viola! Access will generate the report for
you by doing whatever calculations are requires and by placing the
fields of information where you have specified.
As you can probably tell, the above is a very high-level description
of what Access does; there will be a learning curve but I'm sure once
you get a hang of how everything fits together you will save hours of
wasted time spent on formatting and other manual operations.
The best thing for someone in your position is to pick up a reference
guide either for Office or Access specifically. As usual, MS is there
with the answer; Microsoft Press. Here are some links to books that
pertain to the areas you will need help in:
Microsoft Office Books and Resources:
http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/office/officexp/
Microsoft Access Inside Out ($45):
http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/5022.asp
If you have any problems understanding the information above, feel
free to post a clarification and I will be glad to help :)
Cheers!
answerguru-ga |
Clarification of Answer by
answerguru-ga
on
01 Jul 2002 13:18 PDT
Hello again,
The concept behind the manipulation of Access databases (and
relational databases in general) is that you are able to store
everything while being able to produce reports that include only the
information that you want them to have. This requires no manual
operation such as the one you were describing, instead by using a
query, you are able to obtain a subset of the orginal data which would
subsequently be placed in the report in a predefined manner.
For example, lets assume that each agent has an agent#. Using the
query you could obtain all information pertaining to this agent#...but
it is important to understand that all your original information is
still being stored in the background. So to answer your question, no
you will not have to worry about deleting inappropriate data because
the purpose of the query is to "filter out" all the information you
don't want.
If you are doing reports for 10 agents, all you would have to do is
enter in the agent# into the query and bring the results of the query
into your predefined report. This process would be done 10 times over
and is FAR quicker than what you are doing now.
Hope that clears things up :)
answerguru-ga
Now, I understand where you’re coming from with your emphasis on using
Access, but I am still going to have to produce concise, individual
reports for each of my sub-agents and this is the thing which takes up
so much time. Assuming I create a payments template...from which I’m
able to concisely identify a particular sub-agent’s client list and
amount to be paid, am I going to be able to immediately begin using
this data (by which I mean e-mail what’s on the computer screen before
my eyes) without having to first delete inappropriate data for all
other sub-agents records (which is what I’m doing right now in Excel)
beforehand? It’s THIS part you see which is the most time consuming
aspect of currently creating and disseminating the payment sheets.
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