Product Reviews

Total Access Statistics

Crunch numbers like a statistics expert.

• By Mike Gunderloy
• 02/06/2002

Another useful Access add-in from the folks at FMS. This one is focused on helping you perform statistical analyses of data stored in Microsoft Access databases (it doesn't work in Access projects, but since it can analyze linked tables from an Access database, that's not a significant limitation). As with other FMS products, TA Statistics simple to use. A wizard walks you through the steps of choosing an analysis type, selecting a table or query to analyze, and specifying an output table. You then tell TA statistics to run the scenario and off it goes to look at your data.

The results come back as an Access table containing the information you've requested. The product supports almost 20 different statistical analyses, from simple things like percentiles and data description to more advanced techniques such as ANOVA and Chi-square correlations. A nice touch is that the details of each scenario are automatically saved, making it easy to calculate new results when data is added or changed.

For the developer, there's a progammatic interface that lets you call the statistical engine directly, with or without showing the user interface. The price includes a runtime license so that you can add statistics functionality to your own applications.

If you're doing any sort of scientific or engineering number-crunching and your data is available to Access (either as native Jet data or as linked tables), TA Statistics can save you a bunch of work.