I have a real Dilbert kind of assignment that I am hoping that someone can
give me a hand with. Currently my company uses a spreadsheet to calculate
the commision for the sales folks. They want to have a way of saving the
information for historical reasons and want a database. (Personally I don't
see why they just don't save off versions of the database but I don't get to
make that kind of suggestions.)

The spreadsheet is not that complex so there really isn't much that the
database would have to store. It does, however, have a number of
calculations that are based off of the few imputs.

My problem is this. How do I, using either Access or Excel XP, create a
means of displaying the information in a format familer to the users. When I
try to use a Excel drop-in in a Access report and try to import the
information in I get an error that the database is already in use. When I
try to go through Excel, I can't seem to find a dynamic way to send a query
to Access to pull the information that I need.

I might be missing something simple but I am beating my head against the
wall at this point so I could use a fresh perspective.

Thanks

W.W.D.D.
What would Dilbert do?

To summarize: you have a working Excel application that is doing the
job, but the suits want it entered in Access. Do you know why? Do
they expect the work flow to expand so dramatically that it will
require a database?

You may want to explain that Excel is much more intuitive for most
people, and that the amount of time required to develop an Access
database to do a job that's already being done is not worth the payoff.

The pure Dilbert solution is to continue doing it in Excel and create a
dummy database that provides the "cool"? factor the suits are looking
for. Go on vacation and have someone else try to generate your report
from the dummy database; they'll fail because it never worked in the
first place. Your choice at that point is to either casually provide
the report or "work all night to recover the data" and provide the
report, again from Excel.