Tutorial Blog 3 – Microsoft Access, Date Criteria

The Database Project with Access was a great exercise.  The project concepts build on top of what we learned or already knew in Excel and applied them within a new application.  There seemed to be a lot of confusion among peer students on this project, and I wanted to take it as an opportunity to explore one concept in particular.  The part of the query that required us to include only those members who “left” the gym during the prior 6 months from the assignment date seemed to cause a bit of unnecessary frustration, so I developed a video and this text to dig into that just a little more. 

First, it is important to impress that the functions within Access are the same as those within Excel.  Dates are counted in numbers of days, and the criteria for the lesson is very simple:  180 days less than the assignment due date, 3/27/2011, or more specifically, membership cancellations that occurred on or after September 30, 2010.  To demonstrate the similarities between Excel and Access formulas, I created these screen shots.  In math, there is more than one way to get an intended result.  I used the concept of counting days, so, simply put, I calculated the number of days in a month and multiplied by six to arrive at the number of days in the previous six months.  Then, I subtracted the result from the assignment due date (as required) to arrive at a cut-off date. 

In the above screen shot, the Assignment Due Date is hard-coded as 3/27/2011 since I don’t want the dates to change for grading purposes.  However, in order for the formula to be dynamic in a business environment, meaning it would update the prior six months over time, regardless of the Assignment Due Date, I would use the “Now” function:

Similarly, these functions are utilized within Access, only within the Expression Builder, which provides expanded functionality, rather than the Excel function bar:

The video I created walks through creating this expression within Access.

I hope that reading and viewing this tutorial blog proves to be helpful in some way. 
All material used in this tutorial is self-created by the author.

Database Project Blog

While I have been exposed to Access a number of times in the past, I’ve never really applied Access to work…not really sure why, except that Access was always perceived as difficult and Excel is my beast of burden and has sufficiently served my needs.  One thing that I learned in this project is that Access is very easy to use, and I’m glad to have completed this assignment as a refresher for how easy it is to set up.  The function similarities to Excel makes a transition to Access much easier given my proficiency in Excel.  There is one application in particular that Access will serve well at work, and it will be a project implementation for this work year.

That said, there are several improvement recommendations for the project data base.  Primarily, data validation in some fields would help control the input for consistency.  For example, I applied data validation to the State field, to limit the input to two characters representing the state abbreviation, but it could go a step further and be limited to a drop down list of valid states.   In addition, gender and membership type are fields that would also provide great opportunities for input validation to minimize data variations.  Applying such limitations on input variations provides for better output in criteria filters and other information slicing and dicing techniques by capitalizing on consistency.

Overall, this has been a very valuable project for renewing in my mind the potential usefulness of Access and how it can be applied to certain data management needs within our organization.   More importantly, older versions of Access had the stigma of difficulty in use, but this project has overcome that stigma in my mind.  It is a very easy application.