Linking records together

[Ant S]

I have an Ideas/Requirements database which is accessed by several people.
The purpose of which is to record ideas as people think of them and then
these can be reviewed in a meeting. The problem is that people may have a
similar idea so we will end up with many duplicate records even though I am
encouraging them to group ideas into categories via a dropdown category box.
I don't want to discourage this because each idea may have a different and
valid slant but would like a way to link similar ideas together. I just can't
think of the best way to do this?? Should I create another table or just
another field within the main table? After linking a record to another, I
would like records to know they have been liked otherwise it could become a
unmanageable process
Any ideas welcome

 

[John W. Vinson]

I have an Ideas/Requirements database which is accessed by several people.
The purpose of which is to record ideas as people think of them and then
these can be reviewed in a meeting. The problem is that people may have a
similar idea so we will end up with many duplicate records even though I am
encouraging them to group ideas into categories via a dropdown category box.
I don't want to discourage this because each idea may have a different and
valid slant but would like a way to link similar ideas together. I just can't
think of the best way to do this?? Should I create another table or just
another field within the main table? After linking a record to another, I
would like records to know they have been liked otherwise it could become a
unmanageable process
Any ideas welcome

Well, any given idea may belong to one *or more* categories - in fact it would
be very restrictive to limit it to one! Given that, I'd suggest a structure
such as:

Submitters
PersonID <primary key>
<name and other needed biographical info>

Categories
CategoryID <autonumber primary ke>
Category <text description>

Ideas
IdeaID <autonumber primary key>
Submitter <link to PersonID>
Idea <Memo probably>
<you may want to specify the meeting at which/for which this idea is
intended>

IdeaCategories
IdeaID <link to Ideas>
CategoryID <link to Categories>


You could thus assign any idea to any number of categories, and create Queries
linking the Ideas, IdeaCategories and Categories tables to <e.g.> find all of
the ideas which relate to Normalization (such as this one!)
--

John W. Vinson [MVP]
Microsoft's replacements for these newsgroups:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/accessdev/
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/addbuz/
and see also http://www.utteraccess.com