Warren

I just started learning visual basic yesterday by reading online tutorials and just trying things out on my own. There is an application I want to create and use at work but I am having trouble deciding how to do a certain part of it. Basically I am going to inventory about 15 items 3 times a week including how much new stock was recieved. Using that information the program will tell the user how much to order for the next truck based on average sales. My problem is what kind of data storage should i use? I have read about basic input output text file storage and database storage. I want my program to be able to funtion by itself and not require a program like Access but I dont know if a simple text file would be the most effecient way of doing things. Allso I could either just keep adding data and never delete it so i could see sales over time, or I could just keep say 5 weeks worth for my calculations so there wasn't so much data to manage. If anyone could give my any addvice on how to handle the data saving part I would really appreciate it.

loquin

Well, you don't need MS Access to use an access data file to hold the data (although it's simpler to have MS Access available to the developer when creating the database file in the first place)

Using a database file has some advantages over using a text file (or better, a random access file) for holding your data. For one, you can have ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) do the searching for you by simply issuing a SQL statement to ADO. However, there IS a learning curve associated with using the database. Take a look at the examples in the FAQ in the first post in the database forum.