Integrating Excel and Access

Building Microsoft Access Applications

Databases

Microsoft Access Data Analysis : Unleashing the Analytical Power of Access

Format: Paperback
Author: Michael Alexander
ReleaseDate: 04 January, 2006
Publisher: Wiley
Rating:

Excellent
Great primer for those Access developer books. Needing to go beyond Excel? Wanting to start using Access for all your data analysis needs? This is the book for you. Takes you from the beginning into some pretty cool advanced topics. Data discussed in examples is also available for download. A must have for anyone using MS Access for any data analysis project.

Practical number crunching with Access
Doing anything like this with Access is usually a mystery and it takes a long time to put together until now. Many times have I been tasked to automate analysis with an application and I have always recommended Excel for doing anything with numbers and analyzing them. I was very skeptical since I have many Access books that do not go into detail about how to use Access in an analytical setting. The other books that I have just concentrate on programming, application developing or just simple that just teach you the basics of Access. This book puts it all together for you and even does a little VBA sampling so you can learn to use the analysis with an application you might already have.

I was extremely suprised at the way this book was composed with smart but simple step by step examples. The first few chapters saved me a ton of time after I learned many built-in functions for cleaning up data. The collection of functions in the appendix are a gold mine since these help you create expressions and also teach you by defining their meaning and use. After reading this book about a month ago I have been using Excel less and less to do my number crunching and reporting. I was a slave to the updating of cells, links,formulas and cleaning data that was given to me every week, month, and quarters. Now I just imported all my data to Access where I can analyze more data ,better and alot quicker than that other program. . . . I forget what that was, Oh yeah Excel.

You HAVE to get this book in your Access library if you do any work with data analysis and number crunching for financials or statistics. For all of you in any IT field like me that get told to "whip up" a program to crunch some statistics or financials. . . . this book will be the one to save your butt, it did it for me.

Great practical Access examples!
I would like to see the authorr write a book on Excel with the same level of complexity. I have never seen a computer book that has so much practical information so lucidly compressed into so few pages for the intermediate computer user - it's a real diamond.
My only suggestion is, that if you ever author another book and I hope you do, in the future ask your publisher to use larger font in the figures you use to illustrate the examples throughout the book. For example, on page 114, Figure 4-4, I literally had to use a magnifying glass to determine that the little speck of ink between [Actual] and [Adjusted Forecast] was a minus sign. That's the reason I can only give it 4 stars.