Lost: a field with 3,200 entries!

[billfry]

I am now 86 years old and have been working for eighteen months, making a table of the performances my late wife and I played in our tours as a two-person theatre between 1960 and 2008. Today I entered the 3,200th, which meant I had completed about four fifths of the job, but this evening I have had a frightening setback.

The fields of my table are:—
Day of the Week
Date
Venue (name of hall, theatre, church, college or whatever)
Town (& sometimes county, plus state or country if necessary)
Initials of the show (eg: MBK for My Brother's Keeper)
Code number of the show (this relates to another table called Shows)
Description (about 25 words on performance, venue, audience etc)

My problem is that today the Initials field has disappeared from the datasheet, though it still appears in the design version. I do not know what I have done wrong, but it would be an enormous task to put in all 3,200 entries manually. Perhaps I have inadvertently reduced the width of the field to nil, possibly I have accidentally hidden it, or there may be some other explanation, but with any of these possibilities I don't know how to get the field back. At worst, I suppose it could be automatically reconstructed from the Shows table, but even that is beyond my present understanding.

It's probably something laughably simple, but what do you expect from such a stupid old man? :banghead:

 

[moto485]

Try right clicking on the fields and selecting "Unhide Fields"

 

[billfry]

Thank you! It worked immediately. I had spent a disturbed night and got up at 5:30am. I was too frightened to go back to the computer and spent an hour or so doing overdue household chores, but, when I finally summoned up courage, there was your reply, and my problems were solved. It's a beautiful morning in London, and my heart is singing.

 

[SteveH2508]

Please make sure that one of your chores is to back up your file regularly.

 

[moto485]

haha no problems Bill glad I could help

 

[billfry]

Dear SteveH2508

Your advice is very good, and I try to back up, but I'm not sure I'm doing it right. What I do is to save the file "Archives" and a "Copy of Archives" on my hard drive, and then to put another "Archives" and "Copy of Archives" on Onedrive. The disadvantage of this system is that, although it should offer reasonable protection against breakdown etc, it means that any mistake that creeps into the original file is faithfully copied in all the others. I would rather have a backup that saved the previous version, so that I could go back if need be, but I don't know how.

 

[SteveH2508]

Basically, it sounds like you are on the right track. ALWAYS take a copy somewhere else before you start a work session. Then, if you break it (or the computer does), or you make a mistake, you will only lose 1 session of work. When you are done for the day, put a copy on another media.

 

[billfry]

Dear Steve, Thanks again. I have now paid proper attention and am backing up as per official instructions once on the hard drive and again on the One-Drive. By the way, where are you? Presumably not in Australia, like Moto485.

 

[SteveH2508]

I'm a Londoner, me old china!

 

[gemma-the-husky]

bill - just a thought

are you entering the data from your diaries, or is it already in a spreadsheet say. If the latter you can just import the data directly into access without needing to key it all in again manually.

good luck with your project, anyway.

(by the way - do you not have helpful relatives to help you with this exercise!)

 

[billfry]

Dear Emma-the-Husky

Thank you for your suggestion, but my situation is complicated. The sources for the database, especially the performances table (though there are others) are three in number: (1) the earnings book, kept with pen and ink up to the point I've reached (October 1988), gives the date, fee & expenses of each booking; (2) our five-year diary (now in its eleventh volume) which is far too intimate for the eyes of anyone but me and my darling wife (now dead, alas, for nearly three years); and (3) my memory, which is often vivid but not always reliable. The experience of compiling the database brings day after day flashing in front of my eyes.

Do tell me: where are you? My lap top gives the time but not the place of each post, and yours must surely come from a very different timeframe.

Bless you, Bill

 

[gemma-the-husky]

Bill. I certainly am in the UK, but often keep strange hours!

Good Luck. I hope you are enjoying your project.

 

[billfry]

Dear Dave

I couldn't just send a thank-you. Yes, I am enjoying it, but it is fairly exacting. I have made 80 entries so far this week, and they each require me to read my 26-year-old writing in the diary, check the date and the show, give the venue and the town, and then write about 25 words about how it went.