Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Streamline Reporting on Recurring Data Imports

The article from Microsoft walks you through the creation of an Access database that supports importing monthly sales data from a text file, and provides the sample data used to create the article, as well as the database file complete with all the data imported.

The scenario comprises the following tasks:

  1. Set up an import specification to allow Access to import the same data in future months.
  2. Use the built-in Table Analyzer tool to create a normalized structure for the data.
  3. Create a set of append queries that will parse the incoming data into the normalized structure.
  4. Write a macro that automates the data import process.