“They have expertise and skills that I do not have. We could not function effectively without them”

The best tool available to us is LOGIC. We have years of experience of understanding workflows and automating procedures

The other tool we use most is PATIENCE. It takes time for customers to fully explain what they want to achieve and what currently makes their working lives difficult. We have to be extremely flexible in our approach.

Once we have used the above we will develop a solution using the most appropriate of the following tools.

Microsoft Access & VBA – As a guide if your data holds less than 200,000 records, has a database size of less than 100MB, has less than 10 users, does not need remote users, has uniform a mixture of hardware & software and requires integration with other MS Office products such as Word & Excel then we will use these products.

SQL – For larger database sizes, more users, multi sites, remote users, different hardware, scheduled processing of jobs , intranets and web sites  we would use SQL as a back end.

ASP Active Server Pages – Used as a front end for Intranet and Internet sites to display formatted data as a web page. This potentially makes it available on any pc in the world.

PHP – This is a is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language which provides the same functionality as ASP on a no Microsoft platform such as Unix Citrix.

ADO – A method of retrieving data from a central data source for manipulation of display.. Microsoft ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) is a Component object model object for accessing data sources. It provides a layer between programming languages and databases, which allows a developer to write programs which access data, without knowing how the database is implemented.

Visual Basic - Visual Basic (VB) is an event driven programming language and associated development environment created by Microsoft. It is derived heavily from BASIC. a "big brother" of VBA. Visual Basic is a stand-alone development system for the Microsoft's version of the Basic language.

MYSQL - MySQL (pronounced "my ess cue el") is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the most popular language for adding, accessing, and processing data in a database. Because it is open source, anyone can download MySQL and tailor it to their needs in accordance with the general public license. MySQL is noted mainly for its speed, reliability, and flexibility.