I’m so freaking excited! I’ve been working on this project for a few months now. It’s been on again, off again. One of those things that you worn on when you have the capacity... Well, now that there is this push for me to wrap everything up before transitioning to my new role, it’s become a top priority for me.

I have a bunch of things. They are emails, PDFs, word documents, faxes… every electronic form that you can think of. I am creating a tool to organize and catalog this data. The purpose is for someone to be able to go in and say, “show me… X, Y and Z” and voila! There are your results.

Unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. I started off using Microsoft Excel, which I am pretty good with. I was working on the lines of whipping up data related pivot tables…. Nope. That wasn’t going to do it. Pivot tables don’t like text. They want numbers. So then I was off to use lookup tables…. Nope. The lookups were only returning my first hit instead of the 20 things that met the criteria.

The light bulb went off. ACCESS! DUH, why hadn’t I been doing this in Access? I started off with a form. When this form is filled out, it populates a table. Then I built a conditional query so that when you run it – it asks you questions (i.e. what state? Or what product?). THEN I built a report off of this query. See how this is progressing along? So now that I have this mini application built for cataloging data, I am almost ready to show it to my management for more feedback. A few buttons are not working, and some tweaks are needed here and there… but I am SO FREAKING EXCITED that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and know that this project is getting closer and closed to complete.

*phew*