Help for newbies like me...

[merlin777]

This is a summary of the things i've learnt over the past few days from the perspective of a newbie. I wanted to write them down while they were still fresh in my mind. I find that over time you forget the things that you misunderstand and cause you frustration when you’re first learning a new piece of software. It's not meant to be a detailed explanation of how to do things - it's intended to point you in the right direction.

Lookups

I’ve seen the term ‘lookup’ used generically to mean any kind of box that displays something for you to choose and also as in ‘lookup table’, ‘lookup field’ and ‘lookup list’. I found this confusing, especially as I quickly discovered from many sources that ‘lookups’ are a bad idea in tables.

To clear this confusion:
A lookup field displays a list of values for you to choose from.
A lookup table or lookup list is a table with a list of values that can be used as a source for a lookup field.
You can also see the term lookup being applied to a combobox used to display a list for choosing from.
After I’d created them by using the wizard at the bottom of the pull down lists in the data type column (n.b. ‘lookups’ are not a data type – it just seems to be somewhere convenient to put the wizard) I couldn’t work out how to get rid of the buggers. When you create a lookup Access creates a relationship (which isn’t obvious) between the table you are in and the table it’s looking up from. Deleting this relationship (in the relationship view) doesn’t delete the lookup. You need to go to the table’s design view, choose the field you want to delete the lookup from, go to the ‘lookup’ tab at the bottom of the view (where it says general/lookup) and change this to ‘text box’... lookup gone.
This might mean instead of a reassuring word or quantity you’ll see a simple ID number displayed. Learn to be comfortable with that. As a newbie it’ll feel funny but it avoids complications when you do other stuff and you can use a combobox on a form or query to do the same job almost as easily without the problems. It’s bad style for your users to see and enter data in tables anyway so it’s only you that it will bother.
Although i haven’t used one yet, I read that you can use a lookup feature other than in tables (i.e., combobox or listbox on form) without the same negative consequences.

Naming convention

Your number of objects will swell quickly. Being lazy and accepting access’s default offering of an object name will give you a huge confusing bucket of similarly labeled objects which is hard for a newbie and makes it difficult for those fine people on the help forums to help you out. Search for the phrase ‘naming conventions’ for advice but preceding all objects with the appropriate ‘tbl’, ‘frm’, ‘qry’ etc is a good start.


Binding and Bound

When a control like a combobox is ‘bound’ to a source object it means if you change the contents of the combobox you change the value in the source object (table etc). If you don’t want to do that (you might just want to display what’s in the table and maybe choose an item without changing any tables for instance) then you can make it ‘unbound’ by not putting anything in the control source field on the property sheet.


Hiding columns

When you are displaying lists in comboboxes and list boxes there are loads of display options. Just because you don’t see what data in them you expect doesn’t mean you’ve got the data settings wrong, it may mean you are not displaying correctly (e.g. the wrong columns etc).


In access it seems to be the done thing to hide columns by reducing their width to zero rather than by only selecting the ones you want to see. That’s the way it is. I found this was excellent help: http://datawright.com.au/access_reso...m#combo_create


I hope that helps newbies like me. I’m sure others will leap in if anything needs correction or elaboration.

[Dal Jeanis]

Just one slight modification to your comments about "Lookups".

The confusion - sometimes spelled "evil" - comes from having lookups that are built into a table, where the table view is displaying the looked up data rather than the underlying value. This creates a very confusing situation and causes puppies to cry.

There are totally acceptable ways for a FORM to display the looked up data - as a matter, that strategy is preferred in most cases, especially when the value being stored is a record key that the user should never need to know about. In general, a user should never know that "Acme Weaponry Company" is record ID number 666.

[merlin777]

Please feel free to chip in - although i thought I'd mentioned the issue about lookups displaying underlying data I can see it was rather indirect and another explanation won't do any harm at all.