Novice User

[prideofmanchest]

I'm trying to set up a database from scratch and have never used Access before. It's being set up to hold information gathered from a survey of roughly 2000 people on their fave Manchester songs and artists.

It's going to include their name, email, city and 1,2,3,4,5 choices of fave songs. The aim is to have everything in a simple datebase where I can work out who has voted for what in each section, how many votes a song got a position 1 and so on. But I also want to be able to work out the total number of votes over the five catagories.

Is there a way of doing this? I can bring up information by using query but can I be specific as to what information the query brings up?

This is probably a stupid question but any help would be very useful. I'm using the Idiots Guide to Access and as I said this is the first time I've ever used the program only installed it yesterday!!

Ta

Nick
www.PrideOfManchester.com

 

[Sergeant]

While I'm thinking about possible solutions, put me down for The Smiths' "Panic".

 

[The_Doc_Man]

This is a classic case of parent-child tables and forms if ever I saw one.

Do NOT under any circumstances attempt to put all 5 choices on the same DB record. Put them in the child table.

The person's name, e-mail, and city go in the parent table. Include a field to act as prime key for this table. Autonumber should be OK. Then for each person who responds, enter some number of responses using the person's ID number (the prime key) as a foreign key for the child table.

Now, if the score is strictly top five fave songs in any order, you can just count the entries in the child table. If they are ordered in popularity, you can perhaps compute the average rank-order for each song.

The starting point is to see that the details are the individual choices, not the name of the person. Look up topic "normalization" to understand why you do so.