Personal Project

Personal Project

Date: 10/18/2006

To: Yvette

Cc: [ Click here and type names ]

From:

RE: Access Personal Project

Purpose:

The purpose of my access project is to organize the contents of my apartment into a database and be able to query that information by type and/or price.

Outline:

My first sheet was constructed from the elements of the project guidelines including items, rooms and manufacturers. TblItems holds the information in its most atomic level. This information is not repeated anywhere else in the database except for in tblRooms. Tbl rooms contains some of te same info as tblitems because at some time I may want to subtotal the value of each room without having to do a query.

My first query was an "and" query. I believed that I had enough information in the items table to make an "and" query interesting. I queried for rooms with a furniture value of $300 or more. As it turns out, I have 3 rooms with valuable furniture.

My second query was a parameter query and asks the user to enter which type of items they want to view. In this case it asks for the "industry" or category of item, like electronics, furniture, appliances etc. The query was simple but it was tricky to use after I closed it down for the first time. It wanted me to enter the industry several times when I restarted it, before it would actually perform the query. Once I moved the parameter of the industry to the first column, this was fixed.

The last query was an aggregate query. I did a sum, average and number of purchases in each industry as well as renamed the field names visible in datasheet view. The query revealed that I spent the most money in the "various" industry. The only reason electronics was not at the top of the list was because I constructed many of the things in my apartment and categorized myself as the "various" industry, meaning I make more than one category of goods. Since I built my computer, it was put in the "various" category making "various" the big winner.

Reflection:

This was a much more difficult project than excel. I struggled for days trying to get referential integrity to work because I was trying to cut and paste from one table to another before I set up the relationships. The relationships error windows were driving me crazy so I had to rebuild the manufacturer and rooms tables. I finaly got the integrity and cascading to work by setting up the field names, types and formatting first. Funny that it was actually easier that way and access added all the information from the other tables for me. It looked weird