I work at a company entering and auditing data for customers switching to our software from a variety of other packages or methods of tracking their information. The computers in use at the office are a bit ancient and perform slowly enough that I've gotten into the habit of using my MacBook Pro for the majority of my work. I would prefer to remain in Mac OS as I have programs I use there that I'd rather not clutter my smaller bootcamp partition up by merely duplicating them in Windows (where cross platform versions are available). The program I'm trying to replace is Access. I know I could go with a VM, but if possible I'd rather not. Some of the data sets are large enough that I'd like to leverage as much hardware performance as possible against them.The data is almost always going to be coming from an Excel sheet, and any exported result sets need to be seamlessly viewable and editable by Windows users (i'm the only one with a mac in the office).
Examples of the tasks I perform in Access:
Query data using aggregate functions to determine unique values stored in fields or counts of records with specific values or conditions.
Query between linked or imported tables with customer data vs. our data and use joins to determine records present on one side but not the other.
Query for otherwise equivalent data to determine instances where one or more fields are inconsistent.
Write custom functions in VBA or use the built in functions when provided to format or otherwise convert data into properly comparable formats between two tables.
Export results to excel for later auditing, entry, corrections, or sending to customer.
I have been using Numbers for simple auditing tasks, but it won't work for more complex work. I have also tried the Excel 2008 trial for the same simple type tasks, but found no reason to purchase as the specific type of complex tasks above the simple ones really don't lend themselves to spreadsheet work regardless of the program and the simple tasks were simple enough to not really require Excel's higher level functionality.
I have also tried Filemaker, but haven't had much luck duplicating my requirements for aggregate query functionality and some elements of record matching. I am very open to the possibility that I'm simply too used to Access and with some additional poking I'll take to the Filemaker way of doing things. If anyone out there has used it for this sort of work before, I'm open to pointers. So far, it doesn't seem to be as friendly as Access to the sort of throw away, write once, run once, never use it again type of work inherent to working with different data structures for every new task.
I've thought about going the route of MySQL or similar, but for the sake of efficiency it seems like overkill that would bulk up what should be quick and dirty work.
Sorry for the long post , just trying to express my requirements and solutions I have already tried as completely as possible.
Any suggestions? Programs I might have missed?
Examples of the tasks I perform in Access:
Query data using aggregate functions to determine unique values stored in fields or counts of records with specific values or conditions.
Query between linked or imported tables with customer data vs. our data and use joins to determine records present on one side but not the other.
Query for otherwise equivalent data to determine instances where one or more fields are inconsistent.
Write custom functions in VBA or use the built in functions when provided to format or otherwise convert data into properly comparable formats between two tables.
Export results to excel for later auditing, entry, corrections, or sending to customer.
I have been using Numbers for simple auditing tasks, but it won't work for more complex work. I have also tried the Excel 2008 trial for the same simple type tasks, but found no reason to purchase as the specific type of complex tasks above the simple ones really don't lend themselves to spreadsheet work regardless of the program and the simple tasks were simple enough to not really require Excel's higher level functionality.
I have also tried Filemaker, but haven't had much luck duplicating my requirements for aggregate query functionality and some elements of record matching. I am very open to the possibility that I'm simply too used to Access and with some additional poking I'll take to the Filemaker way of doing things. If anyone out there has used it for this sort of work before, I'm open to pointers. So far, it doesn't seem to be as friendly as Access to the sort of throw away, write once, run once, never use it again type of work inherent to working with different data structures for every new task.
I've thought about going the route of MySQL or similar, but for the sake of efficiency it seems like overkill that would bulk up what should be quick and dirty work.
Sorry for the long post , just trying to express my requirements and solutions I have already tried as completely as possible.
Any suggestions? Programs I might have missed?