From: Johnz414 on

Hi,

I'm hoping Access will help me with my Apartment Managing job but I'm
not sure that it will work. It doesn't appear flexible enough for what
my needs are.

I have 20 tenant entries plus about 30-40 other entries for services and
businesses related to building maintenance including the owner's info.

I have numerous other documents (word, mpeg, etc.) associated with work
on individual apartments and/or associated with individual tenants that
I've helped out.

I also keep records of apartment repair needs and jobs completed.

I was hoping to use Access to integrate all this into one Utility that I
could access all documents associated with each individual tenant,
service, owner, etc.

I thought Access was suppose to do this but the first thing I find is
that importing Outlook contacts is limited to entries with email
addresses and then the entries made available are duplicated and not
exactly as they are in Outlook?

Not all tenants have email addresses and I don't need duplicate entries
in Access?

Can anyone explain to me if there is a way to get Access to import from
Outlook exactly what is in Outlook? Is there a way to beef up Accesses
entries to include more info possibly as much as in Outlook contacts?
This would really be of great value if this can be done!

Also, any suggestions for tutorials on how to integrate all that I've
described above would be of great help. Thanks.

John




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Johnz414
From: PieterLinden via AccessMonster.com on
John,

so which is your question? Can what you describe be done in Access? Yes.
Is it easy? Probably not. What you are describing is non-trivial.
Can you link Access to Outlook's Contacts/Tasks/Address Book etc? Yes to all
of them. Can you always see all of the values? Not sure if A2007 can, but
Access 2003 certainly can't.

How far along in the process are you? Where is your data now?

How comfortable are you with normalization? The reason I ask is that if you
try to treat Access as if it were Excel, you will have a very hard time. And
if you don't design your database according to the "rules", you can enter all
the data you want - you just won't be able to get Access to actually do
anything with it - like summarizing etc. Proper design is *critical*.
Access "works" if you design your tables according to "the rules". If you
don't follow the rules, you can't query your database. (And what good is a
database that you can't query?)

Sorry to answer your questions with questions, but sometimes it's necessary.

Pieter

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http://www.accessmonster.com/Uwe/Forums.aspx/access-gettingstarted/201003/1