Construction Management: Excel for Control and/or Reporting

[surval]

Anyone here use excel for some sort of "integrated control" in their companies/jobs and in a way that permits any kind of reporting? If so, please expand about how you got that going on. If not, please say what where the drawbacks your found that prevented such a use of Excel and about what you use instead.

Thanks.

 

[Saboral]

I haven't personally; however, excel by itself probably isn't the tool you're after. Excel linked with Microsoft Access will allow to you create databases for equipment inventorying, cost coding, payable and receivable tracking, and vendor management. Additionally you can create custom forms and data validation objects to control the inputs to your tables. Essentially Access is the database tool running in the foreground, excel will utilize tables (viewable in excel) for the database.

 

[surval]

Managing all the information that could potentially add up in excel when used as a database is indeed problematic. We've been using excel for control of different tasks that don't belong to any particular project to be included in their schedules/programs. We've been doing this for over a month now and just opening the file takes about 15 seconds, so I can't see this becoming manageable in the long term; I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to databases so I hadn't tought of access but I'll look into it, thanks.

I wasn't refering to that though, but rather to using excel as the interface to make reports by making data consultations of external sources (we're running and MS SQL server).

So please expand in the new light of what we've commented.

Thanks.