People's Names

[LisaJill]

I wasn't sure where to post this.

I have a rather sticky (to me) problem.

I have a database of prize winners... the prize winners are often not repeated.

However, sometimes they are. The current database is just an excel spreadsheet in Acccess so I'm rebuilding it.

My thought was to Have a Person Table which would have first name, last name, address, phone, email...

And a prize table with prizewon, datewon, contestwonfrom and collected

(these aren't the actual names, I haven't gotten that far yet hehe)

The problem I'm having is I don't want to assign user id's to people becaue they may never come back... but we do have a fair bit of people that win every few months.

I was going to make a 'name' field and just have the entire name and use that as the matching criteria for person - > prize. However, in looking t hrough some samples I've noted that people always use fldFirstName and fldLastname - never something like fldName (which would bef irst and last)

Long explanation for a simple question - do I really need to break up the name? Or can I just use one field for the entire thing?

Thank you =)

 

[Calvin]

do I really need to break up the name? Or can I just use one field for the entire thing?

Sure you can, but if you are using a custom lookup function on a form make sure you use LIKE and Wildcards, other wise you may have a difficult time locating the person. If your not familier with these look them up in the Help file.

Although you don't want to use a Unique ID field I still have to suggest you do, regardless of wheather the person wins again you are still storing that record in the table, and if you are trying to keep two tables syncronized you need the unique ID, if you try to keep it matched by the name two or three people may have the same name and you will confuse the second table with the related connection.
You don't have to use the unique id on your form or for lookup just as a mechanical connection to keep the two tables from becoming confused.

 

[LisaJill]

I think I was actually going about this the wrong way.

I was falling asleep ... hehe, and it occurred to me that, this isn't a 'customer' database, like the other ones I've done, but rather its prize and contest centric.

The way the tables laid out now I can expand prize and see who won... and I can expand contest and see who won. That really is meant to be the focus.. who won is incidental (to the database, not the people winning of course!)

So I may rearrange things a bit, but thank you for the suggestions, it hadn't occurred to me to use Like as a way to make sure the correc tpeople were getting the correct prize =)