I suddenly got Stupid - Combining tables with queries?

[Ricks41at]

I have 2 tables, One with 250 records with Birthdates, the other with 2000 records with Hire dates, otherwise the table are nearly the same (Name, ID#, Depts. etc) How do I combine the 2 tables so I have all the information in one with those records that have birthdates show up in the table with records that have hiredates? And NOT loose any Birthdate people who are not in the Hire date table?

I used to know this back in Access 5

Rick

[isladogs]

Are you sure there was an Access 5? I thought it went from Access 2.0 to Access 7.0 (97)

Use the table with 2000 records as your new main table and add a BirthDate field
a) use an update query joining both tables with an inner join on ID field to get records in both tables
b) use an append query joining both tables with an outer join to add new records not in Hire table

NOTE: it is possible to do both in one 'UPEND' query (update with outer join) but probably safer to do in two steps

Once you've combined them and checked the data is OK, delete the other table as data should not be duplicated

Recommend you replace ID# with ID as 'special characters' should not be used in field names

[Ricks41at]

I don't want to loose the original tables. And I'm not sure I understand "inner join" and "outer join"

[orange]

For info and examples on various Joins see https://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_join.asp

[Ricks41at]

And where is this "setting" in Access? How do I choose these Joins? And Besides, my tables are square, not roound ??!? :-)

[isladogs]

And where is this "setting" in Access? How do I choose these Joins? And Besides, my tables are square, not roound ??!? :-)

LOL
That's where you're going wrong. Access tables should be long and thin!
The screenshots in this post may be helpful https://www.access-programmers.co.uk...56&postcount=4

However if you don't want to delete the original table after meeting, don't do the merge.
Just use SELECT queries to combine data from the two tables