Southern Coach Sets - Improving The Excel File from SEMG

[SteveyDee68]

Not wishing to cause topic drift, but a friend once attended a conference where one of the speakers was an expert in Access and used it to build databases in use by the government. The expert’s opening remarks made a real impression on my friend, and when he passed them on to me (as I was, at the time, doing Access training as part of my CPD) I heartily agreed…

 

”Access is to a database what a sledgehammer is to a screwdriver - and most of what you [conference delegates] need to do would be far easier to accomplish with the latter rather than the former”

 

(Funny how some quotes stick with you word for word, isn’t it?! Likewise, “Octave displacements enhancing harmonic ambiguity at this point”!)

 

Which my friend (and I) both paraphrased as “using a hammer to crack a nut” …

 

I completed the Access module of my training - but I didn’t like it, not one bit!

 

Good luck with the database.

 

Steve S

[Ian J.]

Re Access, a lot depends on where you're coming from when you approach it. If you come from a full RDBMS background, it's going to feel limiting, awkward, problematic, etc, because so much of what it can do isn't on a par with such a system, and too much is done for you and the code for that is hidden (the way the forms update for instance). But a lot can be done with it if you know what you're doing and accept that it has some serious limitations, particularly in multi-user mode when the back end file is on a network. But above all, now, it's just so woefully out of date in the way its interface design elements work. You can tell Microsoft really don't like it and wish it would just go away, as there haven't been any significant improvements since 2010, and there are bugs galore in the 64 bit VBA code, particularly in the very useful but 'unofficial' undocumented functionality.

[Wickham Green too]

3 hours ago, SteveyDee68 said:

... ”Access is to a database ... using a hammer to crack a nut” …

... and often an Excel spreadsheet is far more complexity than the user needs - when a simple Table in Word will suffice !

[Ian J.]

Progress update.

 

I'm currently working through MK's 'Southern Coaches' book, compiling a list of unique vehicles as best I can and allocating them unique IDs for use in the final database, as well as splitting out build, number and diagram records. This is to act as the 'foundation' for how Sets are formed and, due to the level of detail necessary, will take quite a while, especially as I have other things to do in my personal life as well as work during the day. Consequently this project can't have anything like all of my attention.

 

Currently the basic unique vehicle list has Continental, Ironclad and Thanet stock. Next is the early Maunsell stock.

 

I'm not entirely sure of the Table 1 values and what they equate to, they seem to overlap later tables. I think due to them being the pre-group stock, they might be covered in more detail in MK's more recent book 'Southern Coaches Survey: Pre-Grouping and Mark 1 Stock'. Once I get that book I hope I'll be able to assess Table 1 more readily.