Victim of Foot-in-Mouth Disease, help?

[Igore]

I hope this is the right place for this question. here goes:

my boss was complainning about our filing system(or extreme lack there of) here at work and asked for my thoughts. and like an idiot, i told him. long and painful conversation cut short - he liked my idea and and then told me to emplement it . so i got the filing system worked out thats no biggy. heres the problem. i need to put the system into some sorta database format that can be searched, printed and added to on a daily...r..hourly basis. i need something that is relivily easy to use (easy to use interface....as most people in this office are not the most computer literate) and very easy to set up ( as i am NO genus). i am a CAD Tech. computers - yes i can run them. computer problems - i can fix most small ones. this database thing - i have NO idea. can anyone give me some suggestions, please. i can provide more info as needed. thanx in advance.

ig

\edit for bad spelling

 

[EagleKeeper]

MS Access should provide you the tools for what you need to do. They even have samples to work from.

You can make it as fancy as you wish using entry forms, or quick and dirty by just having the data stored in "raw" form and displayed via a pre-built query (question).

 

[Igore]

ok. that sounds cool. not that i have happy thoughts about using another MS program but i think we might have a copy in the office. which means we don't have to buy it. woohoo! do you know if can i set it up so that it resides on the server and can be accessed from any workstation??

thanx for the info.

ig

 

[WillyF1uhm1]

If your server supports ASP, then you could make a kind of 'website' just for your intranet. With that 'website' you can at least enter, query and manipulate data in that database, with explorer. The printing part I haven't tried yet.

edit You do need to know SQL, though.

 

[Igore]

well that sounds like a good idea. but i am not sure if that will work. we are currently running a Novell 5 file/print server. all the software that we run resides on the workstations themselves. so i am not sure how i would be able to set something like that up. but if you could link me to some info, i would definitly give it the "ol' college try".

thanx for your info.

ig

 

[Ladi]

You can store a copy of the .mdb on a server where anyone can access it (with a desktop copy of MS Access) and enter/manipulate data. The only caveat is that changes to the database must be done with only ONE person accessing the db (so if you want to implement changes, you gotta do it after hours).

Making forms and such through Access to interface with your db and make data entry easy isn't difficult at all. There are dozens of tutorials on the web; I would recommend doing several of them and working on a test database first, then creating the final product. Keep in mind that the most important part of your database is design: what information is needed, what tables does it need to go into?

"Reports" can be formulated in Access in order to print out lists (with relevant information). I never did get these to work on an automated basis, but I believe they can be done with Windows Scheduler or something of the like. Of course, somebody could just click and create these reports as needed. Email notifications of certain events is also possible through forms.

One of the best parts of using MS Access for a solution like this is that .mdb is a fairly universal format -- it can be exported/imported/converted to just about any db format out there, making upgrades and changes to another system fairly easy.

~Ladi

 

[Igore]

thanx ladi

thats exactly what i needed to know.

thanx for the help everyone.

ig

 

[EagleKeeper]

IF the workstations can see the server, they may be able to execute MS Access directly from the server.

I have previously installed Access on an NT server and the workstations that were in the domain had a shortcut on there desktops to the EXE file.

As previously stated, the only problem we had was that only one person could get to Access at a time because of locking.

We ended up installing a copy of Access on each workstation and pointed to the MDB file on the server.