it's a really nice little tool for learning on, as i mentioned in my previous
post, i don't know why MS don't promote it more. i was struggling with
Access for a few months before someone told me about the solutions db. once
i found that, i never looked back, as they say. 'course, not having used
Access for about 6 years now, i'm right back at square one!!! (or square
zero hehehe...that's a computer-geek joke!)
anyhoos...if you write back with some info on what you want to use your
database for, you should get some good suggestions as to what tables you
might need and how to relate them...which should point you in the right
direction
in the meantime...the point to bear in mind is that, if you're database has
"repeating information", chances are, you would be better off storing it in
seperate tables. the point of which, is to 1. save precious space on your
hard-disk and 2. should you, at some point in the future, be required to
change a piece of information, you would only have to change it once (in its
source table) rather than have to change every single occurance of the
information as you would in a flat-file database
try looking at this for clarification:
*open the Northwind "samples" db whch comes with Access
*press the F11 key on your keyboard, this shows the tables/forms/queries etc
that make up that database.
*open the "orders" and "order details" tables
the first record on "orders" has an "order Id" value of 10248
the first three records of "order details" have a similar field called
"order id" each of which has a value of 10248. in relational db terminology,
"orders" has a ONE-TO-MANY relationship with "order details" (ONE record in
"orders" can have MANY related records in "order details") . the
relationship, in this case, being established through the "order id" field.
in the "orders" table, "order id" is known as the primary key (this means
only ONE record in that entire table can have that particular value). in
"order details" the same field "order id" is known as the foreign key.
so...if this information was stored in a flat-file database, ALL the
information in the "orders" table for the entire record for order number
10248 would have to be repeated for each corresponding entry in the "order
detail" record...i.e the customer name, order date, shipping date etc. would
have to be repeated for every single item the customer ordered.
in the Orders Database box, right click anywhere and select "relationships",
this will open a window where you can see the graphical relationships between
these two tables.
here endeth the lesson...hope some of it made sense
jimaldo
