Bob,

I don't work for that particular enterprise any more. You must realize
though, that Guest Satisfaction and Marketing (getting the most money from
each guest) are primary at theme parks. IS drives the front gate sales
effort and POS systems. Backroom accounting and other reporting is an after
thought. Place has been owned by SONY, Seagrams and a couple of other
biggie's, now owned by an even bigger entity -- main concern, contrib to
bottom line. These folks would flip if they read the article I saw recently
about some casino in the southwest that uses a software package to track Slot
Machine action versus physical location and allows them to relocate machines
during the day to get better play from them. Anything these folks do needs
to Increase revenue without any expenses. (EBIDTA or something like that).

Dad worked for IBM -- once told me a story about Arthur Watson (Tom's
brother) and a statement he once made -- "IBM is the most successful
mis-managed corporation in the world". It's boggling to think how successful
some organizations might be if they actually did things the "right" way.

Personally, I liked dBase III+ and dBase IV.

I tend to panic. My project involves my job and doing things properly. We
are presently keeping track of things with pen and paper. We miss things on
a daily basis -- I sense this will come back to bite me in the butt.
Basically, I need a solution LAST WEEK. Upper managements 'tude is -- it's
your issue, you deal with it; and by the way, you have to use what you have,
you can't spend any money.

I will stick to it and overcome!!

Pass me that college ruled pad and that box of Dixon Number 2's!!

Phil


"Bob Phillips" wrote:

I wonder if they have proper auditing and validation and testing in the
spreadsheets as well.

To run an enterprise on Excel is stupid IMO but if you do take that path you
have to make sure that you have very tight procedures and processes.
Unfortunately it is hard to believe that the mind-set that would allow Excel
to proliferate like that could grasp that fact, so they probably have the
worst of all worlds, and probably don't even know it.

As Damon says, utilise the best tool for the job. IMO that is not Access,
SQL Server is better, but Access is better than using Excel as a database.
There are so many ways to inter-connect and utilise the data stored
elsewhere that there is no excuse that I can see.

As to using Access, it is not difficult. Sit down and play with it. Give
yourself a project, like cataloguing your music collection, and you will be
amazed at how quickly you can get to grips with it. As for the varying data
you mention, surely that must be a relatively small proportion of the total
dataset, so just park it off somewhere, a flat file in Access or even a text
file, and accept that maybe the access code for that might change regularly.

BTW, in case you don't know, the elusive Aaron is some a*£!#*e that every so
often flames a set of posts telling everyone to ditch Excel and use Access.
That is just as misguided as the guy who suggested doing the opposite, and
Harlan Grove spent many hours of intellect trying to convince that it is
horses for courses, but he is an evangelist.

Regards

Bob


"PhilMontUSDA" wrote in message
...
Bob Phillips, Damon Longworth, elusive "Aaron".

I can name a fairly large theme park in central Florida with an
'electrifiying' parent that uses Excel for almost ALL of its day to day
finacial reporting. Creating a new "blank" worksheet each night for the
next
days data.

Oh, there is also a critical system the operates on a Pentium III under --
you'd better be sitting ------- WINDOWS FOR WORKGROUPS 3.11

Talk about coming into the 21st Century. These folks haven't got to the
Future, don't know how they can go Back to the Future!!!

Phil Montgomery