Excel

Hi Lisa

Thankyou for your question

There are 2 key steps to creating an effective database, data validation and data normalisation.

Data validation is the process by which you ensure that only the correct types of information can be entered. For example if you have a column that contains employees dates of birth you will need to make sure that:

1. People can only enter dates into the relevant column and
2. That the dates entered are consistent with someone older than 16.

In excel data validation can be accessed from the data menu

Data normalisation appears once your database becomes slightly more complex. If it is a simple list, then it is what we call a flat file database, and normalisation does not apply.

However, once for instance you have a situation where you have more than one column for the same information, e.g. contact1, contact2, contact3 in a customer database, then you need to normalise the data. This involves splitting it into a number of diffeent tables, and would require to move from Excel to Access.

Hope this helps

Regards

Stephen