Re: to normailise or not?

This may involve a small amount of programming, but consider doing it this way:

Howard wrote:

Hi,
I have the perenial student marks database problem which I'm trying to solve for the third time in a simple way.

In a nutshell, one table of students, one of student-classes, one of class assignments and one of students-class-assignment marks
one class = many students, one class = many assignments, one assignment one mark.

The question is to do with ease of data entry. I'd like it to look like a spread*** with names in col A and each assignmenmt in the other columns

Have you considered setting up an actual Excel spread*** for collecting/displaying these data, and having Access suck in what it needs from the spread*** for doing its reports?

In Excel, your table will contain several assignments on the same row. In Access, a Data*** uses a row for just one record, but the Excel table would include info from several records (from the [students_class_assignments] Table) in one row. VBA code could be used to keep the two versions consistent.

[...]

In Excel its easy, one row per student, one column for name, other columns for marks - How can I duplicate this idea in Access without having to see only one student at a time with a subform of all their assignments?

Howard

PS The only way I've found before is to have a temp table laid out like a spread*** into which marks were entered ,then using code I extracted marks and appended them one at at time to a normalised table. Surely there must be a better way.

Perhaps there is a better way, but this is how I'd do it, especially since the meaning of a row in your Excel spread*** is so different from that of a record in an Access Table. And your users would have the advantage of being able to use some of the convenient data-entry shortcuts that Excel provides (and Access doesn't).

  -- Vincent Johns <vjohns@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  Please feel free to quote anything I say here.


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