Re: Denormalizing for form only

Amy

Although the Excel-like Thing1, Thing2, Thing3 approach is familiar to Excel
users, as you already know, it isn't necessary (or desirable) to use this in
an Access database.

What I've found quite useful for such one-to-many relationship is a main
form/subform construction.

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Office/Access MVP


"Amy Blankenship" <Amy_nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:O0vzpdgsIHA.4492@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi, all;

Many times I've answered questions like this in the queries and
tabledesign forum:

I have a table like this:

MyThing
==========
MyThingID
MyThingDesc
MyThingField1
MyThingField2
MyThingField3


Now, how do I query in such a way that Field1, Field2, Field3 are all
treated in essentially the same way? And of course what I tell them is
that they need a separate table, with MyThingField1, MyThingField2, and
MyThingField3 as separate records.

But there is a reason people keep asking questions like this, and it is
that Access does a much better job of making it easy to make data entry
forms with the structure above than with the "correct" structure. With
the "correct" structure, you have to use a Left Join on some other table
that will return you 3 records, and then you have to worry about a
frustrated join. You also may have to add extra code to make sure that
MyThingID gets into the MyNewThing table as a FK. And even then, your
users are dealing with a vertical structure when the horizontal one might
well be more user friendly.

Or at least this is what I've always had to do.

I'm wondering if there isn't something I've been missing, some wonderfully
simple feature of Access, that makes using normalized data less painful
from a form-building point of view. It's very frustrating telling people
"you need to structure your data this way, but then once you do it you
have to manhandle Access into allowing you to enter data."

I'm thinking maybe it's something like PivotTable view, but so far I
haven't seen any tutorials that show how to use it for this.

TIA;

Amy



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