Drilling for Information

Thu, 09/24/2009 - 14:44 — brucew

Dear Jeff,
I enjoyed reading your article "Drilling For Information" in the Technology Workshop section of the Journal of Accountancy. I would like to use this technology in the work that I do. Currently we can download information from our Client Server G/L package into Excel. My reading of your article, takes data from the source and then into Microsoft Access and then into Excel. I guess I will need to get my friendly programmers involved to get the data sent to a text file. So it appears that I should send it from the G/L package (that actually has Oracle as an underlying database that I am not sophisticated enough to use) to a text file and then into Access and then into Excel. Or am I being a dunce about this and just send it into excel? It's going to be one helluva a lot of data for each budget center. Can Excel handle it easily?

I'm trying to drill down to the detail from a budget variance report for each budget center.

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Thank you and Happy Holidays.

Bruce W.

Thu, 09/24/2009 - 14:50 — jlenning

Bruce, Thanks for the kind

Bruce,

Thanks for the kind words, glad you enjoyed the article! It sounds like your export contains a lot of data, and therefore it is probably best as you suggest to import it into Access first. Using the External Data range feature of Excel, you can actually aggregate the data down in to a managable number of rows that can fit into Excel (~65,000 rows in Excel 2003 or ~1,000,000 rows in Excel 2007) by using some of the Sum features inside of Microsoft Query. As you suspect, Access can easily accomodate large data sets, and with the External Data range feature, it is just as easily retrievable in Excel. So, in short, I agree with your plan...and good luck!! Hit me back if I can help.

Thanks
Jeff

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Thu, 09/24/2009 - 15:10 — brucew

Great...thanks jeff

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