Use Access SQL to do a grouped ranking

Question

How do I rank salespeople by # customers grouped by department (with ties included)?

For example, given this table, I want to create the Rank column on the

Answer 1

To add to this and any other related Access Ranking or Rank Tie Breaker how-tos for other versions of Access, ranking should not be performed on crosstab queries if your FROM clause happens to NOT contain a table but a query that is either a crosstab query or a query that contains within it elsewhere a crosstab query.

The code referenced above where a SELECT statement within a SELECT statment is used (sub query),

 "SELECT *, (select count(*) from tbl as tbl2 where tbl.customers > tbl2.customers and tbl.dept = tbl2.dept) + 1 as rank from tbl"

will not work and will always fail expressing a error on portion of the code where "tbl.customers > tbl2.customers" cannot be found.

In my situation on a past project, I was referencing a query instead of a table and within that query I had referenced a crosstab query thus failing and producing an error. I was able to resolve this by creating a table from the crosstab query first, and when I referenced the newly created table in the FROM clause, it started working for me.

So in final, normally you can reference a query or table in the FROM clause of the SELECT statement as what was shared previously above to do ranking, but be carefull as to if you are referencing a query instead of a table, that query must Not be a crosstab query or reference another query that is a crosstab query.

Hope this helps anyone else that may have had problems looking for a possible reason if you happen to reference the statements above and you are not referencing a table in your FROM clause within your own project. Also, performing subqueries on aliases with crosstab queries in Access probably isn't good idea or best practice either so stray away from that if/when possible.

If you found this useful, and wish that Access would allow the use of a scrolling mouse in a passthru query editor, give me a like please.