MS Access

  • Thread starter Continental Translations
  • Start date
C

Continental Translations

I know that this strictly speaking is an Excel NG, however as Access is
somewhat linked to Excel, I thought i'd ask my question here as you guys
always prove helpful.

Basically, I've never used Access before. Nonetheless, I've just looked at a
Access helpguide webpage and played about with it and kinda got the hang of
it. However, I got confused when it came to linking tables together, as all
my info seemed to be in one table.

If anybody is willing and good on Access, I'd appreciate it if you email me
at [email protected] , so as I can explain what I am trying to achieve
and you can then advice me on how many tables i need to create, what to put
in them etc etc....

Thanks all
 
E

Earl Kiosterud

Neil,

Setting up tables for a database is a fundamental and important part of
setting up a database, and a subject beyond the scope of a newsgroup
question. It would be well worth getting a good book on Access.

I'll mention this, though. Rather than getting into normal forms for
databases, and all that stuff you might read about that may not be very
helpful, consider the following rules: A table should be about some kind of
thing (vehicles in a fleet, employees in an organization, etc.) and each
record should be about ONE of those things. One record per thing. Every
field in the table should be clearly about that thing. That's a pretty
unbreakable set of simple rules you should keep clearly in mind.

For example, you might have a Customer table, with one record per customer.
There might be a date field for when that customer became a customer
(information about THAT customer). But if you were keeping track of
customer payments (where you don't know how many payments you might ever
have for a given customer), you wouldn't try to put payment fields in the
Customer table, but instead would have a Payment Table. Every payment from
any customer would go into that one table, and a field in that table would
indicate the customer for that payment (information about the payment, not
the customer).

Access takes care of the relationships between the tables effortlessly
(Relationships), making the Customer record, and any Payment record for that
customer look like one big record, if you've set up the tables properly.

Hope this helps.
 
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