Amazon says it's official. My new book will be out on April 5th.
This book is written for all you Excel users who know that expanding your skill-set to include Access can make you more productive. I guide you through analytical and reporting benefits of Access, and show you how you can integrate Excel and Access to make your life easier.
To celebrate this new arrival, I've decided to post Chapter 1 of this book as today's blog entry. Enjoy!
Being the complete nerd that I am, I work with lots of different technologies. But in the end, I always strive to make those technologies work with Excel. One of those is Xcelsius. Xcelsius is a dashboarding application that takes data and spices it up into slick looking flash presentations.
Those of you who have already been asked to create reporting in Xcelsius may have found it a bit difficult to use. No VBA, no easy way to get connections and no pivot tables.
Well for the upcoming Xcelsius Developer's Workshop, I've come up with a technique where you can embed Xcelsius dashboards into Excel and Access applications.
This allows you to get all the flashy benefits of Xcelsius, but still give users a familiar environment where they can use PivotTables, VBA, MSQuery, etc.
It's too complicated to show with pictures, so I cooked up this video. Enjoy!
» More: Integrating Xcelsius with Excel and Access
It's been a busy week and I've been working hard. I think I'll reward myself by writing a blog post for people I've never met. Here we go.
Let's talk about getting Access Memo Fields into Excel.
If you move data from Excel to Access on a regular basis, you'll know that sometimes Access can't resolve the data being imported from Excel. In these cases Access automatically creates a new table called ImportErrors..
. » More: Clearing Access ImportError Tables
Let's face it, Access isn't typically a tool you would think of when considering a dashboarding platform. The reporting tools in Access, as slick as they are, don't lend themselves to visualizations.
That is, Access doesn't offer a whole lot in the way of dashboarding graphics. Sure, it has charts and conditional formatting, but nothing like Excel.
In this post, I'll show you a hack to spruce up your Access reporting by using your own dashboarding graphics.
I'm in the process of writing my Pulitzer worthy book "An Excel Analyst's guide to Access". During the writing process, chapters get reviewed by a team of editors – one of which is a Technical Editor.
The Technical Editor on this book is Dick Kusleika (Daily Dose of Excel). Kusleika is one of the better technical editors I've worked with. I think his accountant's detail-oriented brain lends itself nicely to tech editing.
Quick Joke: Did you hear about extroverted accountant? He looks down at your shoes.
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During his editing, Kusleika pointed out that that the serial dates in Access actually start at December 31, 1899 (not January 1, 1900 like in Excel).
Just the other day, I saw someone run an Access Query in Office 2003. Then he selected Office Tools ->Analyze with Excel. This essentially sends the results of the Access query to Excel.
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This if fine and dandy, but there is a slightly easier way to get the results of an Access query to Excel.
I've got a lot of writing to do today and this weekend. So today's post will be quick and sweet.
Did you know that you can create your own system tables in Access? That's right; you can create tables that act like system tables.
Here's how to do it:
Clients usually have this pesky need to have everything documented. As a generally lazy person, this offends my lackadaisical attitude. Nevertheless, I typically oblige, given the fact that I want them to take over the work at some point.
Over the years, I've rolled my own documentation tools to help in this endeavor. Today, I want to share a small procedure I use to document Access queries in Excel.
Suppose you've been asked to provide some reporting in Access, but only for those dates that are company workdays (workdays are defined as days that are not weekends or holidays). In Excel, you have the NETWORKDAYS function to help you out. But in Access, you're on your own. There is no such function in Access.
Well, it's your lucky day. Today, I'll show you an easy way to query only workdays in Access.
