Hi Don

I asked a question about whether there were any problems dual booting XP and
Vista in the UK MVP newsgroup recently, and  Mike Maltby posted this
response .....

I've set up several systems to dual boot Vista and XP including a new Sony
Vaio SZ4MN/B laptop that came with Vista Business pre-installed.  In my
case I use BING (www.bootitng.com) as the boot manager thus ensuring that
I don't have any part of another OS installed on another OS's partition.

Due to XP's system restore conflicting with shadow copy in Vista it is
essential to hide each OS partition from each other sharing only data
partitions and to have system restore only enabled on the system drives.
I go even further and using BING remove the second OS partition info from
the partition table when booting the first OS (and vice versa).

and in a follow up posting .....
BING is far more than just a boot manager and is an excellent partition
manager including partition imaging and highly recommended by many of the
Windows desktop MVPs

By the way, congratulations on the MVP award.

XP can have 4gb, but it can only address 3gb - the addresses used by
the last 1gb are reserved by the OS for addressing ACPI drivers.  I've
heard that 64 bit XP can address all 4gb, but I can't seem to find
anyplace to buy it anymore, and I read on the net that many XP drivers
won't work in the 64 bit version.

On Aug 3, 3:10 pm, Jim Thomlinson <James_Thomlin...@owfg-Re-Move-
This-.com> wrote:

Yes, I'm trying to learn Access for the big jobs.  But the end product
of each analysis is a series of ~50-100 bar and scatter charts
presented in Powerpoint, so it means I have to go from Access to XL to
PPT.  Plus I'm not very good with Access, so it adds significant
overhead to my personal workload.

What do you mean by "cubes"?

Thanks.

So, what would you suggest.

I run my analyses on invoice data I get from clients, mostly small and
mid-size manufacturers and distributors.  Most do *not* have modern
ERP systems; they typically use old home-brewed DOS or SQL based
systems.  The most sophisticated ones might have a 10 year old ERP
system with limited reporting capabilities.  So the best I can hope
for, usually, is to get CSV files with raw invoice data (one row for
every line item on every invoice), and for costs (one row for every
SKU).  My job is to calculate margins by SKU, customer, SKU-customer,
product type, and so on.

My typical process is:
1) Use an Excel pivot table to get sales data by SKU and customer from
the raw invoice data
2) Join that to the cost data with an Access query, and export the
result into a new Excel file.
3) Use pivot tables against the new Excel file to get the margin
information I need.

This is iterative; many times during the analysis my team will decide
we need to change the segmentation, which might require that we start
again from step 1 or step 2.

Also, note that then end product *must* be a simple Excel spreadsheet
that the client can use to review and change prices for every SKU,
based on the outcome of our analyses.  (It has to be very simple
because most do not even know how to use pivot tables, and they almost
never have access to business or IT analysts to help them).

I'm open to any suggestions you might have for better methods.