Re: 3 subforms for one form

John,

Yes I agree and I already did that, the form that I am has 49 questions and
some sub questions depending on the answer. I have been very careful to
make sure that all the data is normalized. Most of the paper forms all have
a section that deals with an individual and that information comes from an
entirely different table. The goal of this part of the project is to have
field agents fill out the application on their laptop and then print the
paper forms. They will then export all the data so I can import it into
their main database. Currently they have all of these paper forms in Excel
and then they print it out and send it to the main office to do all the data
entry. So we are taking that process and automating it.

Some time in the future I want to take this out of Access and move to SQL
Server and VB. but I need to learn more about that and understand how to
update multiple companies.

Have you have done anything like this? We have two separate companies that
will be using the database at two separate locations/states. So if I make
changes to the table structure on one database is there an easy way to
update the other database?

TIA,
Rodger




"John Vinson" <jvinson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:o0uur2l694diooovhr4i8v05of11uv2f8m@xxxxxxxxxx
On Tue, 30 Jan 2007 08:27:30 -0500, "Rodger" <NoSpam@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

The table has about 75 fields . . . . .the form is a copy of a paper form
that we have to fill out, it is a government form. Well after much work
and
looking at the form I noticed something . . . . . . I had all the fields
named WRONG . . . . .once I fixed that there was no issue!!! I was doing
a
lot of coping and pasting . . . . that will teach me!!!

That's one (only one of many!) of the problems that often stem from
letting paper forms drive table design.

Paper forms have their own set of logic (government forms may not even
have that... :-{( ). The underlying information structure which makes
sense for a paper form is VERY DIFFERENT from the logic of normalized
tables; if you base your table structure on a paper form it's almost
certainly going to be non-normalized, and get you into a lot of
trouble!

Consider treating your required government printout - not as a Form,
not as a Table - but as a Report, the final output of a system. Like
most Reports, it would NOT be based directly on a table, nor would
there necessarily be a Form that looks like it; instead, your table
structures would be based on the logical relationships between the
real-life entities which go into the report, and the Report (the
"Form" in government-speak) would be based on a Query consolidating
data across multiple tables.

John W. Vinson[MVP]


.

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