Translate the selections of a combobox to different values in the data table

[smk081]

I'm sure this is a basic question but I am pretty new to this and I tried searching for an answer on these forums already.

Basically I'm designing a form for people to input data about another person, I've designed it so that there is a combobox for "sex" with the dropdown options being: Male, Female and Unknown; what I want is a code of "M" for the record to appears under the variable "sex" in the table when the user selects Male, "F" when Female is selected and, last but not least,"U" to appears for the Unknown selection. I

have a bunch of other drop downs that will need to function like this - e.g. the are specific codes for different types of payment, Credit card = 99, debit card = 89, etc. Is this something easily acheived?

Thanks a lot!

[alansidman]

Add a field to the table that the combo box looks to for the values indicated. In that field type M, F and U. In the properties for the combo box, make the bound field that new particular field.

BTW: what difference does it make what is in the table? Tables should store data and not be viewed by users. If you require informtion from the table, then use your form or a query. You can join the table to the lookup table in a query to see the appropriate values if you need to publish this data.

This white paper on data base design is a good read and will help to understand this.

http://www.deeptraining.com/litwin/d...aseDesign.aspx

[smk081]

Thanks for the response - and the link to that white paper, I have had limited experience in database design, and that was a while back, this should act as more than a "refresher".

Basically the reason behind wanting to have Male coded as an "M" and Female coded as an "F" is per the requirements of the people I am building this for. The specs spell out what they want the on-screen selections/options to be, as well as, what the coded response in the table for each of these selections. The people who will be using the form and entering in data won't ever see the backend of this and what their responses are actually being coded as. After data collection is complete, there will be some analysis run on the data - outside of Access, most likely in SAS. The Male/Female example is one of the only instances where a letter is being used in lieu of what is actually selected on the form. Most other cases selections are translated into numeric codes, I'm not sure if this is easier to work with for doing frequencies or whatever the final product will be. I guess this project is less of a database and more of just a data collection/data dump (there will be some 'intelligence'/skip logic programemd into the form -disabling certain fields based on other variables e.g. male only questions and female only questions.) I hope that explains the situation a little bit better.