Not an All Access Pass

I spend a lot of time creating metrics that measure our performance.  An important part of that task is looking at data and how it's entered.  Awhile back we had a log that was created in Excel that would show which items we had received and when.  At first, using Excel seemed to work ok.  However, there were some significant problems.

1.)Multiple users could not log on at once.  We would spend the afternoon calling each other to find out who had the spreadsheet open and have to ask people to close it.  If someone left on vacation or was sick and had the spreadsheet open, it meant we either had to create a new copy or wait until that person got back.  Not a great way to do work.

2.)Data integrity became questionable...fast.  We had people who did not understand how to appropriately sort data try to look for a name, and only sort with the name field.  Pretty soon we had no idea which line belonged to which.  We could no longer have an confidence in recorded issues being listed on the correct record.

With these issues, my management asked me for some ideas.  We did not have any funding, and what I was going to create needed to be user friendly and was going to be created by me, who is not a programmer.  A large stack of Access books later and a 30+ hours of youtube videos later, I built our group an Access database that has managed a lot of our issues.

The video linked below shows one of the first actions I took with our brand new database, and that was to create form entry and to hide the data sheets from view.  This is not the database I created, but is similar in design.  I hope this helps get you started if you decide to start using Access for data entry.