Dear All,

I wonder whether colleagues would be willing to share their methods for working with the individualised file from HEFCE’s HESES re-creation?

The HEFCE documentation gives guidance for working with it using Excel, but for the past several years we have found it useful to load it into Access and interrogate it there, including linking it to other data (eg. a course lookup so we could add course title) and using a number of standard reports.

However, we found that the format of the individualised file from the 2010-11 web facility has changed considerably from previous year, and now has more columns than can be loaded to Access.  We consulted our database administrators about the possibility of loading it to Oracle, but it seems that the recommended maximum number of columns in a table is 255.  The HEFCE file has 956.

Any information that you are able to share would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Jim

Jim Wells

Senior Business Analyst

Student Information and Planning (SIP)

Registry

University of Hertfordshire