Microsoft Access Database for Document Management
Does anyone here use a Document Management system that was developed in-house using Microsoft Access that notifies employees of document reviews, electronic signatures, and annual review alerts? If so, I would like to learn a bit more about developing one in our company, preferrably for free.
Hi,
I use Access to manage specific aspects of our operations including some of the food safety requirements (such as supplier controls and chemical inventory management). As others are involved, its more of application development than simply creating and using a database just for myself. That makes it much more involved. What I mean by that is that you need to be concerned things with splitting the database, backup scheduling, how the application will be displayed across users' system versions and settings, security, logons, version control, network bandwidth, etc.
In a past life, I had a couple of DB developers working for me, so I came into it with a good understanding of some of the basics like data normalization, creating relationships & dependencies, etc. It is a powerful tool if you are willing to invest the time to learn how to utilize it. The learning curve can be high depending on what you are trying to do. (Note that like Excel, there is always more than one way to solve a problem. I've google things and see pages of VBA as a solution, but then someone else solved the same problem with just one or two lines of code).
My suggestion would be to spend time googling and start following along with some of the YouTube tutorials. I personally found this person/channel to be the most useful: https://www.youtube....q03jQ_t9nFV737s. He starts off with the basics, but moves into some of the more technical topics. Any tutorial for 2013 version or newer is useful.
Expect that it will take you longer than you like and you will google more than you want, but there are a wealth of resources out there and over time you will see gains in efficiency.
I personally would look to online form tools for what you are looking to do rather than Access. If you are interested in the online forms, there are a ton of them out there. I've see threads here that discuss ones that are geared towards food safety. We use Zoho forms to manage some portion of our data/forms today. I look every summer to see if there is anything better for our needs within my very cheap budget. It costs us $25 a month and you can get a form set up in a few minutes once you know what you want. Anyway, that might be another means. Having done both, online forms is a lot easier. You can be up and running within a few days easily.
If you are going to have others use Access, there are run-time versions of the program available that let them use the application you built without having a user license. That will save you some money.
Anyway, if you have any specific questions, I can try and answer them for you.
Good luck,
Lost My Mind