25th April 2013, 08:33 AM
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Member
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Join Date: Jan 1970
Posts: 4,425
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That's an interesting, but massive project you're undertaking there.
When you say "shares", do you mean Access accessing 110 workbooks or 110 people sharing the hosted data?
Perhaps you could write a routine that imports the data in the spreadsheets to tables in Access, rather than linking to Excel. Excel is great, but not good at storing significant amounts of data. When I say not good, I mean more prone to corruption or locking up or freezing.
You might want to investigate, Alpha 5 database or Filemaker Pro Advanced or Advanced Server, all have free trials.
One problem you will encounter using sectional times is dirty data supplied by the race clubs. The transponder drops out leaving gaps or no data at all.
Often there are serious errors in the times recorded, I've seen impossible times (fast and slow) recorded. Sometimes the clubs fail to pass on vital information such as barriers relocation making the race distance and times way out.
But you can only work with what's supplied.
Some people go to the extent of timing of video, but this is a huge amount of work and has it's own problems such as camera angles and video compression.
You could of course take this all one step further when you have enough quantitative data. If you look up SPSS by IBM, it can give you some insight into predictive and financial analysis of data which can be used to identify hidden patterns or areas of profit, even predict with some accuracy chance.
Blue Chip financial businesses use similar data models to identify risk, but this can be tailored to identify chance.
Best of luck with the project, be interested to hear of your progress.
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