Many to many relationships shared table?

[mara]

I am only new to access but am at the moment creating a Human resources Data base which will contain all employee information as well as various reports such as incident reports and non conformance reports but be able to link employees to reports.

I am not sure if this is correct but:
to solve the many to many relationship, I have created two forms (one employee reports number, the other report number) and have linked them via a subform. This is working fine for my incident report.

Only I am unsure how to proceed with my other forms. Will I need to start the same process again, or am I able to use both the employee report number table and the report number table for different forms, or maybe just the employee report number?

I want to keep things as simple as possible in the even that someone else needs to create a new HR form in the future.

Thank-you

 

[jdraw]

Many to many relationships are resolved by means of Junction Tables. You may wish to Google the topic for more info.
Here is one link I found that may be helpful.
http://www.foresightsoftware.com/AccessJunctionTables.htm

 

[mara]

I am still a bit unsure on what I am doing, but I have solved the many to many relationship with having a different secondary table for each section (both employee and report). (Ie rather then having an employee with one form number, my employee can have many different ones each assigned to a different report. I figured that as long as I can search an employee I can bring out all the relevent information regardless of how many differnet tables they are connected to. would I find problems with is in future when it comes to data being inputed?

 

[Alansidman]

Before you go much further, you should read this on normalization. I think you may want to rethink your design.

http://www.deeptraining.com/litwin/dbdesign/FundamentalsOfRelationalDatabaseDesign.aspx

Alan