Spreadsheet or Database?

Associate
Joined
12 Jun 2005
Posts
836
Location
Newcastle
Morning all, would be excellent if someone can advise on the following.

Need to find the best way of doing the following, not sure which route is the best.

Need to create a way of displaying what Active Directory groups are required to do certain things. Probably easier if I explain with an example.

Engineer is given 'Level 1' as there AD group level as standard. This contains 'Group 1', 'Group 2' etc... They need to logon to server 'Server 1' which requires 'Group 10', which is not a member of 'Level 1'. They wish to select (from a drop down box) a server and be told what 'group' they need to add to enable them to complete one of the actions (each server has 4 actions, which each have a different group). Additionally they need to see what groups are a member of a Level by looking up that level, and also what they get with there 'level'.

Hope that makes sense.

I was thinking a DB with tables for 'Levels', 'Groups' and 'Servers' and then have the results returned via queries onto forms. Not sure if this is the best way as I have not dabbled in this sort of stuff for years! Or would an HTA be better for this.

In the future it maybe a requirement to have the contents updated from a CSV file, so if Level 1 gets new groups, the import of the file will update this.

Just wanting to get the simple functionality sorted first though. Only constraint really is that it must run on Office 2003 (not 2007 or 2010).

Any advice would be much appreciated.
 
Associate
Joined
14 Mar 2007
Posts
1,659
Location
Winchester
Access is your best bet, if you know vba then you can set up a class for each of your servers, levels and groups. Possibly don't even need to have tables holding the data if they are going to be static just fix it in the code.

Could do the exact same thing with excel too to be honest. Just depends how important it is and if you are going to store large volumes of data.

Stay away from bound fields too:) Thing of the devil.

edit just thought, use Access for sure if you are going to be uploading files, you can then hold the uploaded file into a table and import the table into an array on the form initialization and populate your comboboxes and such from the array.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
12 Jun 2005
Posts
836
Location
Newcastle
Access is your best bet, if you know vba then you can set up a class for each of your servers, levels and groups. Possibly don't even need to have tables holding the data if they are going to be static just fix it in the code.

Could do the exact same thing with excel too to be honest. Just depends how important it is and if you are going to store large volumes of data.

Stay away from bound fields too:) Thing of the devil.

edit just thought, use Access for sure if you are going to be uploading files, you can then hold the uploaded file into a table and import the table into an array on the form initialization and populate your comboboxes and such from the array.

Thanks for the advice, will look into this. Is there any guides that you know of or can point me in the right direction?
 
Associate
Joined
14 Mar 2007
Posts
1,659
Location
Winchester
Your best bet is too search google and fund something which suits your level.

Using vba to do the work for your db is going to take more time than just using the inbuilt functionality of the software.

Standard help in Access or some of the basic walktrhoughs on microsoft are a good start.
 
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