Easy (?) question on tables and relationships...

[pete234]

Ok, I used to work with Access 97 a while ago(using 2000 now) but still have trouble with relationships.

I have a big table created from importing a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet keeps track of contracts signed by markets, Area and the presidents and VP's of these areas, and also dates signed, expiration and total intial sales to each company (and about 15 other fields.)

My goal is to be able to run reports each month that will have the new contracts signed and added to the database. The reports will query by President and Area VP and break down further into markets.

There are 4 fields in the table that I think I need to break out: Region, Area, HQ City and HQ state. In turn, I need to create some way to automatically attach the Pres and VP of each State or Region to the Area or State, so that whenever an Area or State is entered, the record is automatically attached to that person. But if I break out these fields into a seperate table, will I have to back and manually correct each one? I have about 1000 records from importing. Sorry if this is too vague or newbie, but any help would be appreciated.

 

[Dan Aragon]

Sorry no one has replied yet to your post.

You are correct in your thinking that you should break out your information in to separate tables. It is what relational databases are all about. What you are wanting to do is called "normalizing" your data. If you have duplicating information in your records, it's a good sign that you can normalize it further. Without seeing what your data looks like, it sounds like you will at least want to break out your Pres/VP and Area/State in to a separate table(s).

In order to create the table from your existing table you would create a "Make-Table Query" to pull out the Pres and State fields (or whatever you want to pull out) and pull it in to the new table.

Shoot me an email or reply back if you need more information.