Possible to create a relationship with thousands of records at once???

[bshelt]

I'm still fairly new to Access and excited about the potential, but I've had a very difficult time trying to find a solution to my current problem:



I've been appending a very large table by importing thousands of records at a time from Excel files. This table has a field in which every record contains one of three different options (text format):

1. ABP
2. CHALR
3. PSM

I've also set up another table with ABP, CHALR, and PSM to use as a parent table, and I'd like to link it to the large table in a one-to-many format, ultimately replacing the text versions of the abovementioned options with a relationship link to the parent table. It's important because I'd like to link other tables to this parent table, as well.

Is there anyway that I can utilize the text formatted options that are already in the large database to create some kind of look-up and link the desired relationship appropriately for tens of thousands of records at once?

Thanks in advance for any insight provided!

- Brandon

[pbaldy]

If you're saying you want to update the ABP to 1, CHALR to 2, etc, sure. You should be able to use an update query that joins the 2 tables together. You can probably update the existing text field, or a new numeric field.

[June7]

It isn't mandatory to use a number field as the PK/FK linking. Although indexing could be faster with number type, the text identifier will work.

Do these 'other' tables already have the number FK?

Why would these values be in 'other' tables?