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Message: [QUOTE="Lynn Trapp, post: 1777932"] Normalization is the process of making your data as unique as possible and insuring it's integrity as much as can be done. In the kind of application you are describing, you may have a large number of repeating fields. I would assume that a medical information application might need to store the names of various medications that a patient was taking. Now, in a non normal table you might have a series of repeating fields such as: Medication1, Medication2, Medication3, Medication4, etc. And, if you are constantly adding fields that suggests that you may have encountered situations where you had to keep adding new repititions of the field. It would be much better to have a Patients table and a Medications table that are joined together on a PatientID field. You would have one record for each unique PatientID in the Patients, but one OR many records for each Patient ID in the Medications table. Make sense? -- Lynn Trapp MS Access MVP [URL="http://www.ltcomputerdesigns.com"]www.ltcomputerdesigns.com[/URL] Access Security: [URL="http://www.ltcomputerdesigns.com/Security.htm"]www.ltcomputerdesigns.com/Security.htm[/URL] [/QUOTE]