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Greg Wilson Greg Wilson is offline
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Default Lab Management Program

Thanks Nick. I'll check out your suggestion. Hopefully I'll get the hang of
it. If I don't get up to speed in time, at least I'll get some needed
experience here.

Regards,
Greg

"NickHK" wrote:

Greg,
I'd go with Tim in saying Access would be a better data storage than Excel.
How you view the data is a different question.
In Access, check out FileNewDatabases tab and select one of those options.
Access will produce the database structure for you, complete with forms,
queries and reports.
Whilst the output will probably not be immediately applicable to you, it
should give you a good enough idea of what will be required.

NickHK

"Greg Wilson" wrote in message
...
Thanks Tim for responding.

How many samples/tests (per month or year) ?

Very roughly 3 or 4 tests per day. This can vary dramatically however.

How many different types of analysis ?

Very many. The complexities of analysis including reporting are already
handled by other programs. However, these other programs are test

specific.
They don't manage the lab. The program described is mainly to serve as a a
sample record including tests to be done with a few other "bells and
whistles", in particular whether tests have been billed as well as

tracking
samples so they don't pile up or get disposed of prematurely. Tracking how
long samples have been held and charging a storage fee discourages

arbitrary
saving of samples which is currently a serious problem.

Do you also need to be able to track test results ?

No. This is done by existing programs. Test results are mailed and copies

go
to files. We might want to expand the program to indicate whether formal
reports are required and if they have been sent.

What would you consider "inexpensive" (1k/10k/100k) ?

Management is very capricious on this issue. Depends if it's managements
idea or a slaves (read me). If it's a slaves idea, 1k max. Else 10k mabe

but
not likely. So 1k max is likely it.

The need to be able to access the system from 1 PC and the types of
information being tracked seem to point towards a database back-end

(maybe
with an Excel UI).

I was intending to do this exclusively with Excel. I don't have any
programming experience with Access. If we average, say, 4 tests per day,

then
this would amount to roughly 900 tests per year. I think we should start a
new record for each year.

Access may be enough for the DB if your capacity doesn't need to be too
large and there aren't too many concurrent users.

As I said, I'm an amateur programmer. I do my studies and experimenting
exclusivley at home where there isn't an intranet. So I'm not sure about

the
file sharing problem. I don't expect it to be left open too long and

usually
it's the same people creating the WO's and tracking things.

Thanks again Tim for taking the time.

Best regards,
Greg