Help I'm over my head drowning in fields

[JGC]

I have been trying to help a freind with an inspection data base. She does section 8 housing inspections. I am a fairly new user of Access and enjoy working with it but I feel I'm in over my head and would greatly appreciate any help available. I have read using Access and have looked at other data bases but nothing I've looked at seems to have the same scenareos. I started with a basic flat data base to collect information on the tenants, landlords, inspectors and property information. As a flat data base it is awsome. Recently she asked if we could include all the fields of an inspection form (It's alot of fields) so that information could entered on a pentab P.C. in the field by an inspector. I told her I'd give it a shot but have been unsucseful. I have tried a few different confiqurations. I am willing to scrap it and start over but only if I know it can be done. I would be happy to email the data base to anyone, I think it would be much easier to understand the intent by looking at it. Thanks to all in this forum for your help.

Joe

 

[Peter D]

You may need to normalize your data. "Normalization" is a term that basically means divide up your single big table into multiple smaller tables so that there is little or no repetition.

If you search the Internet for "data normalization" you'll get some good sites to take you in the right direction.

This looks like it might be a good one:

http://www.fmsinc.com/tpapers/datanorm/

Hope this helps,