I’m here to tell you the truth. And it sits somewhere between the two. Access takes more effort to become familiar with than a spreadsheet, but it’s not difficult, and it’s very powerful.

You can start right here. After this introductory Microsoft Access tutorial, I’ll follow up with posts on the various parts that make up Access, and show you how to save time and effort.

A Microsoft Access Tutorial: Starting at the beginning

First up, a little boring theory. I’ll make it as fast as I can, and hopefully it won’t hurt too much.

Microsoft Access is an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System). It’s often called a database, that that term actually refers to the information you keep in it. It’s like the difference between a particular spreadsheet and Excel itself.

As an RDBMS goes, Access is decidedly at the smaller end of the scale. It’s not ideal for databases bigger than about 2GB, and doesn’t cope terribly well with a simultaneous user base of more than around half a dozen.

But within these confines, it’s difficult to find something more comprehensive for the price, and many people already have the product, if they have an applicable version of Microsoft Office.

For those of you who have used Excel, or pretty much any other spreadsheet, there are some fundamental differences to understand, and then take advantage of.

Firstly, data and display are separate in Access. That is, you don’t format the data to look nice, or to be easy to input. Instead, you structure it to make sense, and then design separate forms and reports to output the data.

Secondly, you don’t (generally) store calculations. You store raw data, and perform calculations when you need them.

Third and last for now. It’s very easy in Excel to deal with an exception. For instance, if you have a column that is full of numeric values, it’s quite simple on a single row, to decide that putting the word “˜Jim’ in the cell instead makes more sense. You can’t do that in any sensibly designed Access database, so planning is more important.

To get your head around this, some brief summaries of the various parts of Access. It doesn’t all need to make sense the first time through. I’ll cover each of these in depth with separate posts soon.

There’s an assumption all the way through this series of posts that you have some familiarity with Excel or something similar. If you’ve spent the last few decades under a rock, spend some time getting comfortable with Excel first. You’ll thank me later. I’m also going to assume that you want to create a local database for Windows users, even though Access can also build web databases.

We’ve written some helpful Excel articles before, so feel free to take a wander through them. We can help you with calendars, budgets, charts and printing. I even wrote a short piece on using the fill handle to save time.

Tables

These are the basic building blocks of an Access application, and the part that works the most like a spreadsheet.

Planning is required though, because you need to decide how all of the columns are going to work before you start.

Here’s something to work through in your mind before we come back to this in detail later in this Microsoft Access tutorial. Mostly, with Excel, you’re dealing with a single spreadsheet.

In Access, you generally involve a number of tables. Sometimes a significant number. The tables in Access can be linked together, in ways that make sense in terms of the way the information is related. That’s where the “˜R’ in RDBMS comes from, and that’s the power behind Access.

Queries

This is the way you ask questions of Access. You can design them on the fly, and save them for later use. In a general sense, the answers are not saved. Just the queries that will provide the answers. That’s great, because the next time you ask the question, if the data has been updated, you’ll get a different answer.

Forms

These are the visual components that make inputting and viewing data on-screen easy.

Not everyone is going to be comfortable inputting data straight to the tables you create, and you might want more control over how that input works. Forms are the answer.

You can also set these up for more practical viewing of the data from tables or queries on-screen.

Reports

Sometimes you don’t want to see things on-screen. you want to print them, or email them to your boss.

You might want to pass information to someone who cannot use Access themselves. You can easily design and build suitable reports for most situations.

Macros and modules

This is where things get a little more complex. It’s best to have a good understanding of all the components above before you spend any time with these.

Both options are ways to automate tasks in Access, with macros being the easier choice, and VBA modules being the more capable. Both have their uses, and we will come back to them later.

Summary

Access is complex, but it’s not difficult. From an Excel perspective, Access tables are like spreadsheets, but more structured. Everything else is about manipulating those tables to question, view, report and automate.

The complexity is worth it, because of the power Access gives you to achieve more. I’ll be back soon with a post all about tables.

In the meantime, find a spreadsheet you might like to replace with a database. Take a look at the sheets, and see if you can find any inconsistencies. You need to tidy those up to use the data in Access.

Do you use Access at all? Have you struggled? What sorts of problems do you have? let me know in the comments.

I’ve tried out a whole slew of web and phone apps with the sole purpose of managing my expenses, but nothing seemed to suit my personal needs. Each application was either too complex, or left out factors that were essential to me. So I decided an Excel sheet, saved on Google Documents, would be the best way to keep track of both the balance in my bank account, and my spending habits.

Depending on what your personal needs are, there are a variety of templates specifically for managing your budget, available on Google Documents, or if you need something more detailed, there’s Ryan’s guide to putting together your own personal budget on Excel, which you can then upload to your Google Documents.

When it comes to tracking my spending, there have always been two essential factors I need to consider. First, my modes of spending money are varied, whether I’m using one of my credit cards, my debit card, or cash. When I withdraw money from the ATM, I want that to be reflected in my expenses and bank balance, but I also want to keep track of what that money is being spent on.

My solution to this using Google budgeting tools was simple. Using Google Documents Checkbook Register template, I duplicated the first sheet, listing my bank balance and transactions taking place directly from my bank account – deposits, ATM withdrawals and credit card payments.

I used the second sheet to list the amount of cash I withdraw each month, and keep a record of transactions each time I spend money. That way I know what is being spent, where and how.

The template is very simple to use ““ enter your bank balance at the top of the balance column, and each time you add a new entry to the withdrawal or deposit columns, it will automatically calculate your new balance.

The second factor to consider was that some payments I make don’t clear until the end of the month. I decided to keep those transactions at the bottom of the spreadsheet, and to highlight them until the transaction cleared. That way, just by glancing at the balance above the highlighted transactions – I can see what my current balance is, and at the bottom, what it will be at the end of the month.

Spreadsheet formulas can be finicky, so there are a few things you need to keep in mind. You cannot leave a blank row in the spreadsheet, otherwise the formula will no longer work. Sometimes, when inserting a new transaction above the payments that have yet to clear, it can ruin the sequence of calculations. Don’t panic – simple copy the cell with the bank balance that is accurate, and paste it into all of the cells below it, and that will automatically repopulate the cells using the formula.

A word of warning when it comes to using Google Document templates. When you save a Google template to your documents, sharing is automatically set to public. Your personal budget is obviously not something you want to share with the rest of the world, so to remedy this, click on the share button in the top right hand corner. Under “˜See who has access,’ click on “˜People can view this item without signing in,’ and choose “˜Always require sign in.’

Next, click on the “˜Advanced Permissions‘ tab and make sure all options are unchecked. Save your changes, and the document will now be private.

Now that I knew which Google budgeting tools I would be using to keep track of my monthly spending, I needed a way to keep track of my daily spending, so that at the end of each day, or week, I could enter the transactions into my spreadsheet.

Keeping it in the family, I decided to use Google Calendar. I wanted something I could easily access at my computer or on the go, which would also keep track of the exact dates these transactions were made.

I created a new calendar called “˜Expenses‘ and each time I spend money, I immediately make an entry to that Google Calendar with a note of the amount, and what the money is being spent on.

I personally have my iPhone calendar synced to my Google Calendar. Google Sync works with the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Nokia S60 phones.

If you’ve already set up your iPhone to sync with Google Calendar, be sure to go back into your iPhone sync settings and add your “˜Expenses‘ calendar to the list of calendars that are in sync. You could also put Google’s mobile apps to good use for this purpose.

There are lots of little tips and tricks for entering transactions to your Google Calendar easier. You can use Twitter to add entries to Google Calendar. The downside to using Twitter to add your expenses is that it will add any entries to your primary Google Calendar, and of course you’re sending your spending habits to a third party.

For those of you living in the US, you can also send in your entries from your phone via SMS, but again, this option only works with your primary calendar.

There are various ways you can then access the information on Google Calendar to later input into your spreadsheet. I find the Agenda tab the most convenient to use in this instance, as it displays it all in one continuous list.

Do you have any tips on how to use Google budgeting tools to manage your expenses? Let us know in the comments.

So it was with me when I had to convert a delimited text data file to Excel and format it within the columns and rows. That’s a rough challenge for a guy who has a chronic fear of anything that resembles figures. The raw file that I had in my hand consisted of higgledy-piggledy blocks of text and numbers. My simple task was to make sense out of this jumble by importing it into Excel and sorting the data into columns and rows.

Thankfully, many web tutorials came to the rescue of my dead brain cells.

Delimited files are a simple way to store data and import or export it between various applications. Delimited in essence means, data that’s separated by specific delimiter characters. Common delimiters are tab, comma and semicolon.

Think of delimited files as the most basic file format that’s almost uniformly accepted by most spreadsheet and database programs. For those of us who don’t go down that road, a common example is the CSV (Comma Separated Value) files or Tab-separated files we come across in the Import Export wizards of email programs like Outlook and Gmail.

A delimited file is of no actual use unless it is converted into some form suitable for analysis and study. Microsoft makes it easy to convert a delimited file to a spreadsheet in three easy steps.

Let’s start with a text file with some data separated by commas.

To bring the data into Excel ““

1. Open Excel and copy-paste the text contents into a spreadsheet. The contents take up one column and several rows.



2. Click on the column header to select the entire column. Click on the Data tab in the ribbon and then Text to Columns in the Data Tools group.



3. Clicking on the above command opens the Convert Text to Columns Wizard.
4. Alternatively ““ You can directly import a text file into Excel. Excel handles file types – Text, Comma Separated Values and Printer Text File. Make sure to dropdown to All Files or Text Files in the File Open dialog while selecting the file to import. If Excel recognizes it to be a delimited file, it opens the Text Import Wizard which is similar to the Convert Text to Columns Wizard.



In the Wizard, choose Delimited and click on Next.

5. In the second step, choose the Delimiter for you particular file (comma, in our case). For some other character, check Other and enter the character in the little field. The Data Preview window gives you an idea how the contents get separated into columnar data. Click on Next.



6. In the final window, you get to set the data type for each column by selecting it in the preview. The default data format is General. Date and numeric values can also be handled here.



7. Click on Finish to exit the wizard and get your neatly arranged spreadsheet.

It’s just three easy steps courtesy of a wizard. This simple utility gives us the ability to import delimited text files into Excel and apply its number crunching tools on it.

Liked this? We have other Excel tutorials to make an analyst out of you.

They have an opt-in mailing list that they blast to once or twice a month. When I say huge I am talking about between 7 and 8 million email addresses.

Now if you have ever tried to open a file like this in excel you would see something that looks like this:

The reason you get this error is simple.

Excel can only handle 65,536 lines per sheet. It cannot display the rest of it and will truncate it. This is not good if you need to cut your list into smaller pieces. In my case I need to have less than 1 million records in my csv file to be able to import it into my mailing list program.

I tried using Base from Open Office with the same results. Now I could open this as a text file and chop it up manually or import it into an access database and try and manipulate it there as well. But hey let’s check out a free and EASY alternative to split an Excel spreadsheet into seperate files. It is called FXFisherman’s CSV Splitter v1.1 by Sopheap LY.

We came across it here but I was able to trace it’s origins to the actual post on a forum it was created for and that is here. The original purpose of the app was to work with stock data in smaller chunks from a huge dump.

But hey I guess it will work on ANY csv file. Simply download the application and run it ““ no install required.

That will bring you to this screen:

Now this program has two simple options : you can split the csv file by the number of lines and specify the maximum number of files. Simply type in the number of lines you want to split each file into, and/or make the maximum pieces that you would want to see.

Next browse for your file by hitting the Browse file button and then hit the Split Now! Button.

When the program is complete you should see something that looks like this:

This tells me that my file of approximately 100,000 records was split successfully into a few even files. If they were more than 25 pieces with 50,000 lines in each it would have changed the algorithm to make each one slightly larger. Either which way this saved the day! I was able to import almost 4 million addresses at the end of the day into smaller chunks! (Thank god for interns!)

Do you know of a better, easier and / or faster way to accomplish the same thing?

That’s when I sat down with a blank Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in front of me and just started playing around, using various techniques to cut down our budget to bare bones, and create a debt plan that wouldn’t take decades to eliminate our debt, but also wouldn’t keep us eating Macaroni and Cheese for dinner until we retire. In the end, I was able to eliminate all of our credit card debt in only 5 years, and we even had good enough credit in the end to get approved for a low-rate mortgage to buy our first home.

Today, I’m going to share a few of the nifty spreadsheet techniques that I used to generate a usable (and useful) budget, and finally, I’m going to share a technique to pay down your debt in a fraction of the time using the same exact payments you’re making today.  It’s a trick that I’ve seen a lot of guys trying to sell elsewhere on the net – I’m going to share it with MakeUseOf readers here, for free.

Step 1: Structure a Personal Budget Spreadsheet That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts

Anyone who has tried to make a personal “budget” knows the basics. You need to make a log of all of your bills and all of your income. Your bottom line is how much you have left over for fun, or how much fun you have to cut out of your lifestyle before you go bankrupt. It sounds easy, but when you start entering all of your details into a spreadsheet, things get very messy very quickly. A lot of people give up after the first attempt.

The basic layout is easy enough. List your bills in the first left column, and then in the next few columns list total balance you owe, monthly required payments, and the date that the bill is usually due.  These four columns are really all you need to create a budget.

However, here I’ve gone an extra step and added a column to the right for each month for easy expense tracking. However, once you get a large number of columns and rows, the screen starts to scroll and you can’t always see the bills to the left or the header at the top. The quick and easy technique to fix this is using the “freeze panes” feature.

First, select the box where the intersection at the upper left represents the row and column that you don’t want to scroll when you use the spreadsheet’s scrollbars. First, select Window->Split, and then go back again and select Window->Freeze Panes.

Now, when you scroll up or down (as shown here), the header and left column remain static, so you always know what the value you’ve selected applies to. This is a very useful feature and since I have a very bad short term memory, it has saved me a great deal of frustration where I normally would have had to keep scrolling back to check which bill I’d selected.

Step 2: Lay Out an Organized Budget Using Shading

I remember looking for a free budget spreadsheet back then and finding all of these templates filled with data that just made my head ache. Without clear lines separating the major sections of your budget, you’ll have a hard time zoning in on the area that you’re interested in. The best way to organize a budget spreadsheet is by shading each summary section between your major groups.

As you can see here, the first section of the budget pertains to bills, including household utilities and fixed bills, as well as another section devoted to only credit cards. At the bottom of this particular section, the total for fixed bills is highlighted with light green shading so it’s clear and easy to find.

As you can see, once you start shading rows, the entire spreadsheet becomes much more organized and easier to follow.

The “Fill” tool is located on the Excel menu bar and appears as a paint can tipping over with paint pouring out. Just highlight the entire row (click the numbered gray cell to the left) and then click the Fill button and select what color you’d like to use.

Step #3 – Use Excel Formulas to Project Your Credit Card Balances Into the Future

Now that you can make a personal budget that is well organized and structured in a way that’s very easy to follow, the next step is attacking that nagging credit card debt that’s been plaguing you for years. In these next examples, the same formatting techniques are used to create a list of credit card balances and monthly payments.

Set up your debt log in the same way – split and freeze the panes, but this time list each month along the left, and your credit card balances (and monthly payments) to the right. After you’ve entered in your current balance in the top cell (for example, in this case Capital One is $3,000), in the next cell below it you would enter a formula that multiplies that balance by your card’s interest rate and divides by twelve. That is your estimated monthly interest.

Then you subtract your monthly payment from the balance, and add the interest that you just calculated. Once you’ve got that first cell calculated correctly, you can duplicate the formula for every month below it by clicking and holding the small box to the lower right of the cell you just calculated, and dragging it down as far as you like. Each month will have a new calculated balance based on the previous months balance.

When you do this projection, you’ll eventually find the spot where the balance is completely paid off. As you can see from my own calculations, when I maintain a $250 payment every month until it’s paid off, it’ll take me until July 2012 to pay off the entire Advanta credit card balance.

Step #4 – Recalculate Payments Based on Interest and Eliminate Your Debt

By playing around with this kind of spreadsheet, I uncovered the very simple, common-sense solution that a lot of scammers out there are charging people for. Instead of maintaining constant payments on each of your credit cards until it’s paid off – you pay the minimum balance on all of them, and divert all of your current “debt-payment” money toward the credit card with the highest interest. Here is how it works.

This is also why I love Excel. By using the ability to “autofill” the monthly balance calculations, I tested different scenarios to pay off debts faster. Instead of paying $100 on Discover and taking until 2011 to pay that balance off, I paid $200 and will have it paid off by December 2009. Then I take that $200 and add it to the existing $250 I pay on Advanta.

As you can see, the Advanta balance is paid off in April of 2011, almost a year earlier. If you have additional credit card balances, you simply “snowball” the payment and eliminate your debt in months rather than years. Excel allows you to see that concept in a very cool graphical form by using the formula “autofill” feature.

Do you use Excel or other spreadsheets to make a personal budget or to plan out your family bills? Share your own tips and resources in the comments section below.

Available as a Firefox addon and thus available for Windows, Linux and Mac Outwit is a web collection engine that lets you search for documents, images and other kinds of information online and displays the results in a very Windows Explorer like interface.

Head over to the Outwit webpage and install the Firefox addon. There are separate addons for Outwit Hub, Outwit Docs and Images. You can then access the Outwit interface via the toolbar button or the tools menu.

Consider Outwit Docs for example. Once you open it up its pretty intuitive, type what you want to search in the search box and you will see results from Internet and your local files. You can check/uncheck the type of files you want to search for. Found the file you were looking for? Great, just right click and choose to open it up or save it or whatever you would want to do with it.

You can have multiple searches going on simultaneously (reminiscent of something like Limewire) and the results would continue to increase when more such files are discovered that meet your search criteria.

Then there is a basket (strangely called the “catch”) which is like a temporary holding place for the documents (your catch) that you find interesting and would like to download later in bulk.

So much for documents, there is a lot more you can do. Outwit Images that lets you search for images in a similar fashion. Even more powerful tool however is the Outwit Hub. Where as Outwit docs and Outwit images search for documents and images respectively, Outwit Hub can be used to search for a variety of information types.

Outwit Hub is used for information extraction from webpages. Fire it up and then enter the search query or URL of a webpage. Outwit Hub will then show you different kinds of data that can be extracted from the webpage. Click on the view type on the left hand side pane and you can view the page, all the images on the page, links, email addresses, text, rss feeds found and so on. Then there are the data extraction tools which allow you to extract data from tables, lists and other data structures on the webpage.

These tools have a great potential if you are looking for data or documents of any kind. Granted, you can always copy and paste and search for them on Google but you can do so much more with tools like these. A lot more flexibility, more control and ease of use. You can for example extract the data from a table and export it as excel spreadsheet or as SQL statements in just a few clicks from within Outwit Hub.

Do you know of any such tools or extensions you use for similar purposes? Mention them in comments, we would love to hear and check them out!