historic financial data tables

[sihingrich]

I am new to ms-access. I have Access 2000. I would like to set up a
data base for financial information on companies. For example,
price/earning ratio, earnings estimate, etc. The information would be
on approx 2,000 companies going back 10 years. I would like to use the
data base for analysis with MatLab, S-Plus or some other statisitical
software.

Is setting up a table for each year with the appropriate field: company
name (ex IBM), ticker symbol IBM), price/earning ratio (20.0) etc the
most efficient way? I could link companies by their ticker symbol.

Thanks

[pietlinden]

sihingrich wrote:

I am new to ms-access. I have Access 2000. I would like to set up a
data base for financial information on companies. For example,
price/earning ratio, earnings estimate, etc. The information would be
on approx 2,000 companies going back 10 years. I would like to use the
data base for analysis with MatLab, S-Plus or some other statisitical
software.

Is setting up a table for each year with the appropriate field: company
name (ex IBM), ticker symbol IBM), price/earning ratio (20.0) etc the
most efficient way? I could link companies by their ticker symbol.

Thanks

Why not just make Company and Year the joint primary key? I would
definitely NOT split the data into separate tables, especially if you
want to do time series analysis. If you want, you can create queries
in Access and use them from your stat package (usually, anyway).