I tried looking but to be honest i'm not sure what i'm looking for, other than advice that is!! 
I'm designing a database to log details of boxes sent for storage. Users need to be able to enter details of new boxes and search existing data to request them back from storage. My main data table is as follows:
tblData
-------
BoxID (PK)
Barcode
DescriptionID (FK)
BoxType
StartDate
EndDate
Retention
DateAdded
Colleague
TeamID (FK)
Boxes are added to the database with the above details. The problem i'm having is with the StartDate and EndDate fields. When I started building this I was told that the boxes contain documents between two dates, the StartDate being the date of the oldest document and EndDate being the date of the most recent. Now they've told me that sometimes it's not dates they use to refer to documents, it's file numbers.
So, for a handful of (quite a large list of) DescriptionIDs they want it to record file numbers instead of dates.
I'm thinking at the moment that just making the fields Text fields is the way to go since then they'll be able to put whatever they want in, but i'm concerned that that will make it difficult to validate entries and thus difficult to perform searches on the records.
Any ideas folks?
Thanks in advance for any replies!!!

I'm designing a database to log details of boxes sent for storage. Users need to be able to enter details of new boxes and search existing data to request them back from storage. My main data table is as follows:
tblData
-------
BoxID (PK)
Barcode
DescriptionID (FK)
BoxType
StartDate
EndDate
Retention
DateAdded
Colleague
TeamID (FK)
Boxes are added to the database with the above details. The problem i'm having is with the StartDate and EndDate fields. When I started building this I was told that the boxes contain documents between two dates, the StartDate being the date of the oldest document and EndDate being the date of the most recent. Now they've told me that sometimes it's not dates they use to refer to documents, it's file numbers.
So, for a handful of (quite a large list of) DescriptionIDs they want it to record file numbers instead of dates.
I'm thinking at the moment that just making the fields Text fields is the way to go since then they'll be able to put whatever they want in, but i'm concerned that that will make it difficult to validate entries and thus difficult to perform searches on the records.
Any ideas folks?
Thanks in advance for any replies!!!
