help with table/query

[blooberrys]

in my table i have these fields : Fee, Amount Paid and Total Owed.

i want the total owed field to subtract the amount paid from the fee.

i made a query and brang the three fields down.

next to total owed i put

Total Owed: [Fee]-[Amount Paid]

In the query it displays the correct amount but doesnt seem to want to save it to the table for some reason

does anyone know why?

and is there a way i can make the feild in the table so it does this sum without making a query?

 

[Brianwarnock]

You shouldn't and don't need to store the calculated field in the Table. Any time you require it, for a report say, you can calculate it.

Brian

 

[blooberrys]

yeh true, i did think that, just would of been handy


thanks

 

[Dairy Farmer]

Data is stored in a "raw" format in tables. By that I mean that tables only collect data, they don't process the data. Queries (forms and reports use queries to display data) are where the data is processed and this is "on demand". If the table had to do the processing, the database would spend all its time processing. Imagine that everytime you changed a field the whole table would have to recalculate itself. Add a few more users and the database would be unusable.

What you could do is have a temp table that stores Customer and Owed. The data is written to the table via a Make Table Query. Again, if you have multi users you would have constant updating of this table and could end up having consistantly out of date data.