I've got tables -- need help with next step

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Guest

Hi. I’m a brand new Access user and have basically been tasked to teach
myself Access and create a DB of all of my org’s projects around the world
and the various staff attached to each. We have 13 regional offices with
multiple people each office and hundreds of projects.

Here is my current question - any guidance is greatly appreciated:

What I am trying to get to is a way for people to enter new projects by
typing in the name of each project then go column by column (the field of
each column being one of our country offices) and choose from a list box to
choose the lead person from each country as well as the country of the
project, etc. to ensure data integrity and not have people type in data
differently.

I’m really getting nowhere (except frustrated) with this. I currently have
one big table listing all of the org’s employees and their data, with one of
the columns in that “Country†and the primary key being the full name. I
have a second table of “Projects†with the current projects and their info
including the people attached to each, primary key being the project name. I
imported these tables from Excel into Access – but now I am going around in
circles and stuck.

I’ve also tried to create a form (that will add the inputted data back into
the table, right?) to allow the user to input the data described above, but
got nowhere. Got caught up in seemingly needing to create a Lookup List
perhaps?

Again, any guidance is enormously appreciated. I feel like I desperately
need step-by-step help and this is a huge, yet basic, problem to answer via a
discussion group. Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

Emily
 
Hi Emily,

You've landed a big task and professional assistance is certainly one of
the options you should consider. But before you go much further, obtain
and read a basic Access textbook , and study the Northwind sample
database until you understand what's going on inside it. One big table
is almost certainly not the solution to your problem!

If the intention is that this should be a central database shared by
people in offices all round the world, you are way out of beginner
territory.
 
Tell them you will need six months. I agree that this is a lot for a beginner.
Let me just point out that while a table resembles a spreadsheet, it is not
at all the same. You should be able to describe a table's purpose in a
single sentence without using the word "and". I think you will need an
employee table and a project table for starters. Each employee can be
associated with several projects, and each project can involve several
employees. That is called a many-to-many relationship, which means you will
need a third table to resolve that relationship. You can see that this is
getting pretty deep right from the start.
Relationships between tables are at the heart of relational databases. The
employee table would contain a field for FirstName, LastName, Street, City,
Zip, Phone, and the like. Each employee's name and corresponding information
is entered once in the employee table, where it is identified with a unique
number which can be either automatically generated (autonumber) or assigned
(SS #, for instance). Every record (such as from the projects table) related
to that employee contains the ID number, not the name. When you view the
data you can view the name rather than the number, but there is no need to
store it. The advantage is that if an employee's name changes, all records
related to that employee will still contain the original employee ID number.
It is like SS number in that if you change your name it does nothing to alter
information associated with 123-45-6789.
It's a lot of stuff, but it can be managed in reasonable-sized bites. I was
a complete beginner not all that long ago. You've come to the right place.
 
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