Hi all,



I'm working with an NGO that is just beginning to move its data from Excel to Access, so that it can keep track of more and conduct more sophisticated analysis. We're using the Charitable Contributions template distributed by Microsoft, and Access 2010 on a Vista machine. Something we're hoping to figure out is some way to protect the identity of our anonymous donors.

I thought perhaps the easiest way to do this would be to change the "donor" field in certain forms to display the ID number of the donor record, as opposed to the full name as it's programmed to do. The anonymous donors' names could either be kept in the Donors table, or in a separate table linked to the Donors table, in which their names would be listed as Anonymous. This is proving to be a little bit over my head, though, and I'd appreciate a nudge in the right direction.

An alternate idea I had was to add a true/false field to the Donors table, which would cause the name in other tables to appear as Anonymous, or as the record ID number, when selected in other tables. The more I thought about this course, though, the less simple it seemed.

Is there a better way of going about this that I haven't figured out yet?