Using forms in excel

[bobharding]

Hi all

 

I have a feeling that the answer to this is going to be far more complicated that I realise but ...

 

Datahandling is often a difficult topic to teach and not helped by software that makes a mountain out of a molehill (IMHO). I know that Access is very powerful but is often a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

 

Most pupils can get on OK with excel but it's difficult to edit single records or to create queries and reports. It occurs to me that if you could have a nice 'form' tool that connects to an excel back end then this would overcome some problems. Something cool may even offer xml conversion, searching and queries. Something really cool may allow multiple users to access a single excel file (or maybe connect easily to a SQL server) fo that you can have multiple input.

 

Has anyone ever seem anything like this?

 

Bob

[Pashers]

Hi Bobharding,

 

Only one person can write to an excel sheet at one time. Multiple users can read the same excel sheet however. You could always convert the Excel sheet into a database (sighs, I know you don't want to), more so a server database e.g. mssql, mysql etc.

 

Access can give a nice 'easy' front end if someone sets it up (i.e a form that pops up at the beginning to access premade queries, forms etc). Excel is also very good for queries.

 

I think Access is as good as your going to get, as what you are asking is the actions of a database.

 

Other than that, I don't think there's much else you can do.

[bobharding]

Thanks for getting back Pashers.

 

I suspect you're right. I guess that what I was looking for initially was a form designer for excel then maybe extending this to a piece of software that acted as a 'server' for and excel worksheet.

 

Access does have forms of course but I'm worried that the 'database' as a single application doesn't seem very 'real life'. Basically the SQL route seems much better ultimately and I wondered if a simplified server would be possible ..... imagine pupils building a mock 'facebook' or media player application? Doing this in Access would be a real stretch but the concepts are not too outlandish.

 

Ho hum - never mind - guess I'll keep looking

 

Thanks anyway

 

Bob

[p858snake]

imagine pupils building a mock 'facebook' or media player application? Doing this in Access would be a real stretch but the concepts are not too outlandish.

Not really, if you have the tables correct with the right relationships you can use the web section on the side (i believe its called pages or something) and build a very basic one. I did a very very basic one the other year in class that had a table for user details (eg: age ect ect) and then a table for friends (eg: Unique_ID, UserID1, UserID2) and had it show who is friends with who.

 

Although having a local install of wamp/xampp ect on the local terminals and teach them mysql/sqlite/whatever and web design (php/html) at the same time would be alot nicer.