Don't hate the rookie....please help -- simple question

[Erik]

I would like to design a database which helps me track some stock information
which builds daily. I have an Excel file with 500 stock tickers (fixed) and
dates at top of columns. What is the best way to represent this data? I need
to calculate and report % change in the Wk EPS values. Do I build a table
for each date? Or each Ticker? Each day the data will increase and I would
like to notice trends (i.e. one week or one moth trends). I have read the
database design documents and help file to no avail...Thank you in advance.

Sample:
4/22/05 4/25/2005 4/26/2005 4/27/2005
Symbol Wk EPS Wk EPS Wk EPS Wk EPS
UIS 1 4 88 90
MAT 2 41 41 95
DYN 1 93 41 41
HAS 2 4 8 41
DPH 3 41 41 41
NAV 3 41 41 41
CSX 8 6 41 74
SANM 5 41 41 41
FITB 6 10 41 41
FRE 6 8 41 41

 

[Paul Overway]

You build one table...period. The table would contain the following fields:

tickersymbol
epsdate
eps

Each day, you'd enter the a new record for each tickersymbol.

From this, you can create a crosstab query to display the data in the format
you desire.

 

[John Vinson]

I would like to design a database which helps me track some stock information
which builds daily. I have an Excel file with 500 stock tickers (fixed) and
dates at top of columns. What is the best way to represent this data? I need
to calculate and report % change in the Wk EPS values. Do I build a table
for each date? Or each Ticker? Each day the data will increase and I would
like to notice trends (i.e. one week or one moth trends). I have read the
database design documents and help file to no avail...Thank you in advance.

Sample:
4/22/05 4/25/2005 4/26/2005 4/27/2005
Symbol Wk EPS Wk EPS Wk EPS Wk EPS
UIS 1 4 88 90
MAT 2 41 41 95

This is a good spreadsheet, but is not properly structured for a
relational table. In a relational database, "Fields are expensive,
records are cheap"; you should certainly NOT store data (dates) in
field names! A tall-thin table is the ticket (ticker?) here:

Symbol TradeDate EPS
UIS 4/22/05 1
UIS 4/25/05 4
UIS 4/26/05 88
UIS 4/27/05 90
MAT 4/22/05 2
MAT 4/25/05 41
MAT 4/26/05 41

<etc>

Symbol and TradeDate could be a joint two-field Primary Key since they
uniquely identify the record.

John W. Vinson[MVP]