2 simple questions - sorry if long

[jamied66]

I'm sorry if I'm asking relatively simple questions. I'm a break/fix guy, and our in house programmers told us it would be 6 months before they could help us out, so we're tackling this chore ourselves.

We have a database of company names along with corresponding contact information. Each company has at least one associated id number. One company may have several numbers, but each number is unique. A very simple creature. I'm using a combo down box to allow the users to search by company name. This box only pulls the distinct company names. There is also a second combo box that has every id number. These are the only two methods used to navigate through the form.

How can I set up these two boxes to "track" each other? Right now, if I select a company name, the id number box doesn't move to its corresponding entry, and vice versca. How can I set these two boxes up to follow one another as a user navigates?

Our second problem might be a little more challenging. Like I said, each company may have more than one id number. We would like to set up a query that would pull all of the company id numbers when a user selects a name using the above drop down box and insert them into a text box.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[ColinEssex]

How can I set up these two boxes to "track" each other? Right now, if I select a company name, the id number box doesn't move to its corresponding entry, and vice versca.

Search for "cascading combo boxes" - but this is not the way to do it (see my 2nd reply)

Like I said, each company may have more than one id number. We would like to set up a query that would pull all of the company id numbers when a user selects a name using the above drop down box and insert them into a text box.

Your companies should only be listed once in the companies table with only one ID (an autonumber) this is the link to any other company related table. You need to take the time to get this right and make sure every entery in other tables relates to the correct company. If you have multi-entries, you will run into problems when doing queries / reports etc.

Col

 

[jamied66]

Thanks for the hint to look into the cascading combo boxes.

Also, I agree that the way I'm going about the design part of this particular database isn't going to be the optimum. But they really just want to be able to scroll through/search a list of contact information and notes and pull a report or two from it. And most importantly, since the upkeep of this information will have to be the responsibility of one or two end-users, I want to keep the information update function as simple as possible.

I'd rather struggle with an odd query or table setup on the front-end and have it easier for the end user to update the database as items change.

If anyone could help me out with pulling the company id numbers from a particular company name and inserting the values into a text box, I'd be very, very grateful.