Dear all
Just found you and am very happy to have done so
I suspect mine is an autolookup query and have done a search on previous posts but am not really any the wiser. Part of the problem is possibly my lack of understanding as I reckon the Access Help isn't. (helpful that is). So very short words please! I'm using Access 2002 under Windows XP.
I have been asked to design a small database to keep records of a "think tank". I think I know what I want, I'm just not clever enough to do it! I'm OK with lookup tables when there's only 2 involved, but I need to somehow link 3. Some members of the think tank are organisations, some are individuals. I want to keep these as separate tables as organisations may have a number of employees attached to them (that's fine - I can handle that bit!). So I have three tables: Organisations, employees and individuals.
My problem is that I want to be able to add "key interests" to organisations and to individuals. These are just simple checkboxes with a catch-all "other" text field. If I have the employees and individuals in the same table I could put key interests as extra fields in here, and just have "organisation" as a non-mandatory field. However, as some of the individuals will not have organisations attached, I suspect this may cause problems with address lookups? Additionally, I want to be able to add key interests to an organisation once (so any new employees I add within that org will automatically have the same ones) rather than having to add key interests to every individual. I know I could get round this by using a list box to add key interests on a separate form after orgs and individuals have been added and the record "completed" - but this could lead to information being missed off - it's a workflow thing, lol. So I'm looking at a separate table for key interests - but I need to link it to the organisations table and the individuals table. These don't share a common field, and I can't use autonumber as this would result in duplication in the key interests table.
I've been racking my brains on this for about 2 days now so wouldn't be at all surprised if this doesn't make any sense! Maybe I'm approaching the problem in the wrong way? If so, any design suggestions most appreciated by this rank amateur. If it helps, I'm happy to send what I've got so far as long as you promise not to laugh.
Thanks in advance
Sandre
Just found you and am very happy to have done so
I suspect mine is an autolookup query and have done a search on previous posts but am not really any the wiser. Part of the problem is possibly my lack of understanding as I reckon the Access Help isn't. (helpful that is). So very short words please!
I'm using Access 2002 under Windows XP.I have been asked to design a small database to keep records of a "think tank". I think I know what I want, I'm just not clever enough to do it! I'm OK with lookup tables when there's only 2 involved, but I need to somehow link 3. Some members of the think tank are organisations, some are individuals. I want to keep these as separate tables as organisations may have a number of employees attached to them (that's fine - I can handle that bit!). So I have three tables: Organisations, employees and individuals.
My problem is that I want to be able to add "key interests" to organisations and to individuals. These are just simple checkboxes with a catch-all "other" text field. If I have the employees and individuals in the same table I could put key interests as extra fields in here, and just have "organisation" as a non-mandatory field. However, as some of the individuals will not have organisations attached, I suspect this may cause problems with address lookups? Additionally, I want to be able to add key interests to an organisation once (so any new employees I add within that org will automatically have the same ones) rather than having to add key interests to every individual. I know I could get round this by using a list box to add key interests on a separate form after orgs and individuals have been added and the record "completed" - but this could lead to information being missed off - it's a workflow thing, lol. So I'm looking at a separate table for key interests - but I need to link it to the organisations table and the individuals table. These don't share a common field, and I can't use autonumber as this would result in duplication in the key interests table.
I've been racking my brains on this for about 2 days now so wouldn't be at all surprised if this doesn't make any sense! Maybe I'm approaching the problem in the wrong way? If so, any design suggestions most appreciated by this rank amateur. If it helps, I'm happy to send what I've got so far as long as you promise not to laugh.
Thanks in advance
Sandre
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