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Introduction

Data Handling Coursework Report Choice of Problem When asked to think of ideas to base my ICT course work on I came up with the following; * Make over salon * Modelling agency * School health centre * Job centre * A tracing family trees agency I decided on the job centre for a number of reasons; * This idea was original; no one else in my year was basing her coursework on a job centre. * A job centre would require a number of specific pieces of information. As I needed to think of at least fifteen different fields for my course work I decided it would be easier for me to think of the field titles I would need. * There would be a lot of information concerning job agencies available, making it easier if I needed to research something for my course work. * A variety of different people would apply to my job agency I would not have to be typing the same information in repeatedly making it more interesting to create a database on. Job centre data base I was struggling to keep track of all the clients' records so I decided to use a database to sort these. I had less need for a database, which held my clients looking for employees than I did for those clients looking for employers as I would not be looking to find information quickly and easily as urgently. If the database I was going to set up for my clients looking for jobs was successful I would also set one up for those searching for employees. Setting up a database meant I would be able to find information for prospective clients instantly so I could tell those looking for employees whether I had someone suitable for them quickly. I could find records quickly to update them; for example if someone had a change of address I could easily find the old one and bring it up to date. ...read more.

Middle

Data Verification and Validation It is always possible that the data entered into my database is incorrect. In this case it must be corrected, if data is incorrect it can cause problems. If something such as a phone number is incorrect, I may be unable to contact my client. Or even worse; if for instance I typed a job other than the one my client was looking for allot of time would be wasted finding them a job that they had not asked for. Clients may also be disappointed that we had not lived up to the standards, which are expected of a company and leave, asking for their money back and giving my company a bad reputation. There are several different ways of checking whether the data entered is correct, they are stated below; The data can be checked manually, this insures the data is accurate. It is called Data Verification; this can be done in two ways; * Proof reading: This is when a second person goes over the data and compares it with the original; any incorrect information then found will then be corrected. * Double entry: This is when two different people enter the data twice separately. The computer then compares the data and any errors found are corrected. It is extremely un-lightly that both people will type the data in wrong so the data is bound to be correct. There are of course problems with using Data Verification; Double entry is time consuming meaning it will be expensive to employ people to do it. Proof reading is also time consuming, it is also not always accurate; it is quite possible for a mistake to be overlooked. The Data can also be checked with the use of a computer. It is called Data Validation; this type of check ensures the Data is of the correct type. There are four ways this can be done; * Range check: This check ensures that the data entered is within a specific range. ...read more.

Conclusion

This also applied to my database; I was delighted to find that there was also a spell check available on Microsoft Access. The spell checker however is not faultless and I found when going over the printed out version of my database some spelling errors (such as spelling 'forename', 'forname'), which more lightly then not had been brought to my attention by the spell check but I had disregard it as I was probably checking the spelling very quickly. However in the interest of saving precious time and paper I corrected what I could of the spelling mistakes I found at the time but left minor ones discovered at a later date. If my database were real they would of course all be recognised and corrected promptly through Data Verification. Another thing, which was brought to my attention, was the way the ages of my clients are stored on my database. As it stands I have got two fields to store data about the age of my clients. One for the date of birth and another for just the age so that a person seeking the age of someone on my database does not need to spend time working out the age. This alone has many drawbacks; someone would frequently have to check that the ages were still up to date. This would be time consuming, probably more so than working out the age from the date of birth. I did however with the help of Microsoft excel create a sort of 'age check' which meant I could check the date of birth to the age quickly. Even this was not ideal; I endeavoured to find an easier way of keeping the ages of the clients in my database correct. I then discovered 'Macro' software designed to help with this sort of problem. Macro would alert me using a dialog box to the fact that the age of my client had changed. 1 26/04/2007 ...read more.

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