Creating a Knowledge Base

[certified_techy]

Good evening,



This is my first post on here and I hope it to be the first of many because I want/need to become a pretty advanced user of Access pretty quickly, however I know very little about it right now.

My question this comes out like this...

I'm looking to create my own knowledge base that I can basically keep with me wherever I go. I've seen some advanced knowledge base software out there, but I want something relatively simple; something I can search quickly and accurately to find an answer to a problem that I've already solved in the past.

Does anyone have any ideas or templates for a knowledge base in Access? I've searching Microsoft's site and they have a decent design but it's tied into ANOTHER database that I don't want to have to use. Basically, I'm looking for something along these lines with the following fields; title, problem & solution, keywords/tags.

Any ideas on where to start with that?

Thanks in advance!

[R_Badger]

Bit of advice before you go too far ahead, walk before you try to run, learn the very basics and you can find a lot of help here.
Templates are good to put you in the right direction, but for your first attempt you should try to do it off your own back. Not only will you learn incredibly quickly (I did), but you are guaranteed to understand everything you have implemented:

Something I read and have seen recommended more times than I think i could count to:
http://www.barrywise.com/2008/01/dat...gn-techniques/

Orange has a list of video links on the subject that are good too (below is that last post of it I can remember seeing)
https://www.accessforums.net/showthr...708#post114708

I would approach your Table structure first
Tip: Think what you want to store, then think how the logical way of storing it (not always natural but it gets that way).

For instance
A problem, may have several different solutions
A single solution may fix several different problems
A certain keyword may match problems and solutions

Once you've read the background data above, see if you can come up with a relationship diagram, and once you have post it and I'm sure there will be people piling in to help.

[certified_techy]

Ok, after reading that, I def need to start out by crawling or even learning how to sit up on my own before trying to jump into that... The most experience with Access that I have has been in class, which was basic basic basic stuff; pre-scripted and "look and find" answers type stuff.

Back to basics... lol

[R_Badger]

Don't be disillusioned!

Basically the normalisation boils down to 'Store your data so it is easy to expand and to search"

Step 1 in designing a database is looking at the information you want to store.
You want a knowledgebase, so you want:

Tbl_Problems
ProblemID Problem_Description

Tbl_Solutions
SolutionID Solution_Description

Tbl_Reference
RefID ProblemID Solution_ID

This allows you to have a list of problems, a list of solutions and a reference between the two, allowing you to having multiple solutions to a problem and multiple problems to a solution.

Maybe that will help you back on the road to happiness, don't give up, everyone here started off in your shoes at one point!