MS Excel or Office Help

[dancerjodi]

Hello All,

Sorry to bug you with a question on such stupid software(s). I've just changed from a job where I had some really neat tools to one relying soley on MS Excel and Access and I'm trying to make them jump through hoops that I'm not sure they are meant to jump through (keep in mind too, I don't know Visual Basic but have been able to get them to do some things with SQL).

I'm trying to take a file listing

Name $amount_1 $amount_2
Bob Smith $30 $40
Mary Jones $25 $33
Etc

And I need to take each individual record per person and insert it into a new document, listing only the data for that person. This ideally would happen somewhat automatically and would allow me to re-run the process as needed (though, I don't have to actually save each individual 'entry' or 'file' per person - most likely I'll be printing it).

Any ideas how to automate this? I was asked to do it and was told that the old analyst had a neat way to do it (her neat way was creating a template and then manually linking in each individual row of data, ick).

Any tips would be really helpful (And yes, I have been poking around in the help files and online)

Comments

what format...

[deirdre.livejournal.com]

what format do you need the final output in?

If you can use Word for the output, you could use a mail merge (Tools menu) which can pull data from either Access or Excel. You won't get a new document per record, but you will get each entry on it's own page with Section breaks between...

If you need to pull Access data into Excel, from the data menu look at Get External Data. You can set up saved Queries to import data.

Re: what format...

[sbazzy.livejournal.com]

i was going to say the same thing about mail merge. you'd have to go in and do the mail merge each time, but it's pretty easy to just walk through the steps.

Re: what format...

[dancer.livejournal.com]

Thanks both; I was actually working on the Mail Merge thing and then read this after I did it :)

There has GOT to be a way to end up with either an Excel file or Access Table or Report . . . I just can't find it (but it would be a neat trick)!

MS Access

[lensman.livejournal.com]

you should be able to do this in MS Access

Create a new DB in Access that has a linked external table to the MS Excell file. then you can generate any report you want from inside access.

To repeate the process you just put the new excel data file in the place where the old one was and rename it accordingly. Re run access and your reports now have the new data.

[grovegoddess.livejournal.com]

Yes, Access, Excel, Word and Pulisher all have some sort of merging thing that will allow you do to do this. You can also write a basic excel macro that would actually allow you to save each report as a separate file but that would be a lot of files. It is doable but hard to communicate in a typing format. Its really a being there kind of thing.

[mizdarkgirl.livejournal.com]

Have you tried vlookup? I could help! (I used support Excel for a living)

Take a look at these different "Tips and Tricks" for some complex office stuff...
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/default.asp?url=/technet/archive/office/office95/tips/IME97B4.asp

[utsukushiyama.livejournal.com]

Sorry to be late seeing this, but I cut off my Boston contacts a while ago for personal reasons. If you haven't solved this by now, let me know and I'll try to way in. It shouldn't be that hard.