Help with designing a form

[Antimatter]

I finally got my database to work properly and got an ruminary form up and working properly i can enter all the information correctly, now i want to enchance my form.

here's a picture of the structure of the database.

and here's a picture of the current form as it is now

Ignore the errors in the subform it should be author name i'll fix it later

this is the picture of the subform as i want it to appear

anyway what i want to do is convert a my publisher, topic, series, trilogy, author and the position text box into a combo box, so i can just type in first few letter and get rest of the name to pop up and if its not the one i want i can keep on typing then have it automaticaly add it to the relivalent table, but my problem is how can i do this because i have two columes in my tables and whenever i try to set it up it just show a droupdown list of numbers which is my ID's i want it to show the actual name, then store the ID into the book database in the relivalent spot.

now for the author one its a little odd, basically i type in the author name and if its not in the database it automaticaly parase and seperate it into 3 section and store it in the correct colume. in the author database i have three colume: first, middle, last for the author name.

anyway basically the form i want to enter the author name is "first middle last" then when it get added to the database via an notinlist event it will seperate and insert each name into the correct colume, and if the author has no middle name such as "first last" it will leave the middle name blank.

i'm not very familar with VBA and form designing in access so i would like some help on this.


i had droupdown box working on my first database but it was almost an flat database which was... bad so i normalized it and expanded on several items. but i'm just not sure how to redo the droupdown list with this new structure.

thank you for your help

 

[maxmangion]

whenever i try to set it up it just show a droupdown list of numbers which is my ID's i want it to show the actual name

go to the properties set the column bound equals to 2 and column width equals to 0cm; 2.54cm

 

[Antimatter]

go to the properties set the column bound equals to 2 and column width equals to 0cm; 2.54cm

whoa didn't expect it to be that simple, i did that and it works thanks!

now only one item remains is the parasing of the author name into seperate columes


[edit] ah a little problem, when i select a new publisher, it replaces the one currently selected. how can i get it to take the publisher ID and assign it to the book table under the publisherID table?

i tried to change the data entery from publisher under the publisher table to publisherID under the book table and it gives me an error about wrong data type

i'm thinking it might require some scripting?

 

[Antimatter]

*bump* worked a bit on this but haven't been able to solve the issue, i'm thinking that what i need to do is when i select an field is to have vba access the ID of that field and store it into the fieldID in the book tables.

any ideas on this?