Hello everyone,

I have almost never touched Access before, and I think I have to use it
for what I would like to do; it is this:

I have weekly pay data .csv files with 14 fields, including employee ID
number, pay code, shift, pay rate, etc. The .csv files are named by
pay period end date (e.g., 20060507; 20060604). Using a date range, I
would like to be able to compile reports about overtime hours worked
and paid, or hours by shift, etc. This kind of thing is easy enough
for me in Excel on a week by week basis, but I get stumped at how to
compile either annual data, or selected range data (for instance, if I
was able to pivot just the pay periods in Q3, for that quarter's data).

I did two things before breaking down for advice: I have one Excel
workbook with all of the .csv files as worksheets; and I built my first
ever Access database, with each of the .csv files as imported tables.
(Oh, importantly, the 14 fields are all consistently named in each .csv
file.)

The amount of data would crush Excel's 65k row limit pretty quickly;
so, I went to Access...but I'm unsure how to get the info out of it
now. I would think I should be able to use Excel as a 'front end,' and
I would just need to tell the pivot table what to total, etc. I feel
like it's simple, but I'm not getting it; Access relationships across
50 tables are baffling me....

Can anyone offer me any advice as to how to query this data without
trying to wrap my head around SQL? Or should I do just that?

Cheers,
Chris