First question.... 'Which answers do I want?'

A few people have said they would like to explore the Access idea a bit further so I thought I'd give it a go.

Before I delve into constructing a database it is important to have an idea of the sort of information you would like to be able to get out of it. You can fill terabytes of hard disk with data, but if nothing useful comes out of the other end, there really would be little point. Equally, as I said previously, I am no software professional - merely a reasonably competent hobbyist - so I need to be relatively conservative in terms of what I can expect to achieve.

As sports traders, as a minimum, we need to know how many trades we've made and in which sports. What the stakes were, and with what result. I suspect most, if not all serious and semi serious traders have this kind of information in a spreadsheet, but even hobby traders would surely benefit from being able to track their activities. Most would probably like to have some kind of graphical representation of their trading - be it success rate, or to see how their bank is growing (or not!). There are commercially available compiled spreadsheets which will do this for you but I've always found that good as they are they usually don't present the data that I want to see in a manner in which I want to see it and there is little or no flexibility available to the end user.

So, to start this exercise off these are the kinds of reports that I will aim to produce from this simple little Sports  Trading database....

First - a Summary of trading activity... something like this:

Secondly - a summary of the above information broken down by sports... like this:

Lastly, for now anyway, a pictorial representation of the trading bank... like this:

These 3 reports have been knocked up in Excel, and are completely fictitious. The purpose is solely to get an idea of the kind of information we might need to record and to form the basis of outputting that data in a form which is a) useful b) clear and c) flexible.

Over the next few days I'll construct a simple database which will get us to the point of being able to store, view and report on the data shown in the first two images above. Those who are not familiar with databases might be thinking there is little advantage to this over Excel. I would urge you to persevere because I promise you the advantages will become more apparent as time goes by.

In case you're wondering how long it will be before we get to tracking the betting bank... the answer, at the moment, is that I'm not sure. There are several ways to skin that particular cat and I'm still mulling over which way to go, so bear with me!