Re: Denormalizing for form only

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Amy,

I understand your frustration. I've designed a couple report card
applications for various schools and each was pretty tough to normalize and
yet make data entry easy.

Could you post a sample dataset of how it should look to the user? I feel
like there's something that I'm not understanding and maybe looking at the
final product would help.

I've always found solving the mazes on the back of a cereal box easier to
start from finish than start.





Amy Blankenship wrote:
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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