To anyone who can help me.

I am in the process of creating a database for a recruitment agency and am having problems! The database is fairly small and consists only of a table of clients, customers and invoices.

The company which I work for has a sales ledger in which they write down certain details off the invoice (ie.date, company name, amount, fee, etc.) every time an invoice is sent. They asked that this be put on a spreadsheet. However, every time access generates an invoice, it is stored in the invoice table and the information they wish to insert into the sales ledger is all there. There therefore seems little point to me in them retyping the information on a spreadsheet every time they create an invoice. So, I used a select query to isolate the details they wanted (for example they only needed the name of the company, and not he address and telephone number)and hoped to be able to link this to a table in excel, which would be automatically updated every time an invoice was generated. As it was likely they would also want to calculate monthly totals and produced forecasts etc. it seemed like the perfect solution.

I found that the table could only be linked from access and the only way I could think of the linked table being updated was by using an append query. This has turned out to be a poor idea as every time the append query runs, it of course not only appends the new records to the spreadsheet, but the old ones as well, and as any calculations I try to perform on the appended data, such as =sum(G5:G7), don't work and give me the result;0. Is it not possible to carry out calculations on appended data?

When looking through excel help files, the function I was really looking for appeared to me to be the paste link option but this doesn't make itself available when I copy data from the select query in access and attempt to paste it into excel.

Have you got any suggestions? I hope that this has made sense and I have tried to explain it as simply as possible, but if there are any questions please don't hesitate to email me!

thanxs.
ps.I am using both excel and access '97