I have two observations on this. It is the case that you cannot perform statistical operations directly in Access. On the other hand, Access is a much better tool than Excel for creating the lists and sublists from which you prepare the data that you submit for statistical analysis. And Access will effortlessly handle lists with two or three million data rows.
A statistical program like MInitab can import data from Access, and it is a lot easier to perform statistical operations in Minitab than in Excel. At least that has been my experience.
On Nov 3, 2006, at 3:32 PM, Dan O'Donnell wrote:
Hi Abdullah,
Would you want to report back to us on what you decide? This seems like an interesting problem.
-dan
On Mon, 2006-30-10 at 14:46 +0100, Joris van Zundert wrote:
HI Abdullah,
You said 'data crunching'. It looks like I should interpret that as 'counting and computing numbers'. If so, stick to Excel. Access is a database. Databases are about describing/modeling, categorising, searching and selecting data. Spreadsheets are the things of use if you actually want to count things and apply statistics.
That said, you could do it in Access - but it would take a considerable amount of additional VBA-scripting to get Access to count your phenomena properly. Excel should provide standard functions and solutions in most cases.
If you're talking about really vast amounts of data, consider using more advanced statistical tools like SPSS or Stata.
Hope this helps, y.s., Joris van Zundert
On 10/29/06, Abdullah Alger Abdullah.Alger-2@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk wrote: Dear all,
I would like to ask for advice whether I should use MS Access or Excel for data crunching. I have been using Excel for some work I am doing on Old English poetry where I am looking at specific features of a fixed set of poems. However, I have decided also to look at other aspects of the same set of poems. To put it in a nutshell, I have three sets of data I want to compare concerning the same poems in order to see where the trends are. I know how to use Excel fairly well - at least to get statistical information - but I have been getting into trouble when trying to find trends across severalsets of data. I thought about pivot tables, but I am not sure if that's the way to go, when I think that I may be able to do things easier in Access - even though I don't know anything about how to use it.
Which application would you suggest I use? Best, Abdullah Alger _______________________________________________ Digital Medievalist Project Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org Journal (Spring 2005-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist@uleth.ca dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l-- Mr. Joris J. van Zundert (MA) Huygens Institute Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences
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