Importing Outlook's Address Book to Access?

[Johnz414]

Hi,

I'm hoping Access will help me with my Apartment Managing job but I'
not sure that it will work. It doesn't appear flexible enough for wha
my needs are.

I have 20 tenant entries plus about 30-40 other entries for services an
businesses related to building maintenance including the owner's info.

I have numerous other documents (word, mpeg, etc.) associated with wor
on individual apartments and/or associated with individual tenants tha
I've helped out.

I also keep records of apartment repair needs and jobs completed.

I was hoping to use Access to integrate all this into one Utility that
could access all documents associated with each individual tenant
service, owner, etc.

I thought Access was suppose to do this but the first thing I find i
that importing Outlook contacts is limited to entries with emai
addresses and then the entries made available are duplicated and no
exactly as they are in Outlook?

Not all tenants have email addresses and I don't need duplicate entrie
in Access?

Can anyone explain to me if there is a way to get Access to import fro
Outlook exactly what is in Outlook? Is there a way to beef up Accesse
entries to include more info possibly as much as in Outlook contacts
This would really be of great value if this can be done!

Also, any suggestions for tutorials on how to integrate all that I'v
described above would be of great help. Thanks.

Joh

 

[PieterLinden via AccessMonster.com]

John,

so which is your question? Can what you describe be done in Access? Yes.
Is it easy? Probably not. What you are describing is non-trivial.
Can you link Access to Outlook's Contacts/Tasks/Address Book etc? Yes to all
of them. Can you always see all of the values? Not sure if A2007 can, but
Access 2003 certainly can't.

How far along in the process are you? Where is your data now?

How comfortable are you with normalization? The reason I ask is that if you
try to treat Access as if it were Excel, you will have a very hard time. And
if you don't design your database according to the "rules", you can enter all
the data you want - you just won't be able to get Access to actually do
anything with it - like summarizing etc. Proper design is *critical*.
Access "works" if you design your tables according to "the rules". If you
don't follow the rules, you can't query your database. (And what good is a
database that you can't query?)

Sorry to answer your questions with questions, but sometimes it's necessary.

Pieter