How do I make comparisions in Access?

[Gramps]

I've already figured out that about 90% of Access's capabilities are things that I probably won't ever be using. But that still leaves a lot of things. I suppose I'm going to have to go out and buy a book.

I did manage to rewrite the Miscellaneous ROI report generator so that it looks nicer when dumped to the screen so that it doesn't lump all the text or truncate numbers, and so that it now only shows plays, wins, win %, avg. mutuel, and ROI (which required moving the objects around the display area and rewriting the alogrithms which were predefined no-longer-used output). Now all I have to do is figure out how to EXPORT the darned thing to a file so that I can post it here and share it with whoever else wants it.

What I'm trying to figure out now is how to write a query so that the horses in a race can be compared to each other. In other words, I might want to look for a horse with 7 or 8 Quirin points where the most QP any other horse has is 4. Or a Cramer which is at least 5 pts higher than any other horse. Something like that.

Any tips?

[Carl]

Hi Gramps.

1) I sent you the Glen2 ROI Calculator. Did it show up?
2) Glad you got the report the way you want it in any case. You should be able to send it out as an e-mail attachment and/or post it on this board as an attached file.
3) As to the other stuff you asked about, I don't know how to do that but I think Mike, Hurrikane, Rick and Donnie do. I think that is where you get into calculated fields.

later,
Carl

[MikeDee]

gramps

when I want to post on the board from the db I click on the print preview icon and then in the middle of the tool bar you will see a W and down arrow click on the down arrow and click on analyize with excel. This will paste the contents to a spread sheet. on the spread sheet I can center the columns, clean up the nos' if necessary and paste in a message using the code commands. You can try sending to it word as well but I always had good luck with excel.

regarding your other questions sounds like you plan to skip the easy stuff and go right to the more complex. I have found these kinds of things best done with vba. You can write programs in visual basic and put them in the module section. these programs can be used to say count the number of runners in a race that have 7 or 8 qpts and then perhaps you only want to look at races where there are only 1 or 2 of runners with 7 or 8 qpts. Or you can compute the cramer speed differential between runners and only look at races where the number one cramer runner has a 5 (or whatever) dif over the number 2 runner.

If you want to go there, let me know I can recommend some books and provide assistance.

[Gramps]

Carl: the ROI did arrive, thanks.

[Cliff]

MikeDee,

I would be interested in seeing your suggestions for books about VBA.

Gramps,

I saw an article on the same premise you mentioned.....7 or 8 Quirin Points, next best is 4, etc. Had "long-term" plans to test it out but don't know any VBA. Perhaps someone on the board has already run some tests?

Cliff

[MikeDee]

A few months ago I looked at the speed melt down theory. The one that goes 3 or 4 runners above something like 5 q points. forget exactly how it went but never really found it to hold up. I think a few others did the same thing. For my money I would stick with espeed diff or fr1 diff. Think it does a much better job of Id'ing a runner that will get to the lead then Qpts. Weather it can hold on down the stretch is another matter, but when they do it can be bombs away.

The best book I have is Access_____ VBA Programming for Beginners. (Just fill in the blank for the version of access you have. ie 97, 2000 etc.) The authors are Robert Smith and David sussman. Not a book to read cover to cover unless you are having trouble sleeping. What I do is once I have a idea of what I want to do read the sections that might apply and use my db instead of their sample db to try and figure it out.