Access Rookie - Contact Management DB from Microsoft Help

[kyngfish]

Hi,

I've got some experience with relational databases broadly speaking, and have written code from time to time, but I would characterize my skill level as being very low. My company needs a way to manage contacts in the short-term, before we acquire something a bit more robust, and the template by Microsoft which allows for contacts management will work well for now. I just wanted to add some functionality and was hoping you kind people could help.

For 90% of what we do, this is fine. The only exception is the organization data. When it comes to organizations, I need to be able to sub-categorize them, and when a new contact is input, they need to be associated with the correct organization, for example, ESPN is an organization, but they may have branches in Mexico and Argentina, and the contact is only associated with one of those. A simple solution is just calling the organization "ESPN Mexico" or "ESPN Argentina", but because I'd rather not store the data in that manner, I was wondering if there were any other solutions which might be relatively simple to implement.

I know I can create an Organization table and create a relationship between the "Organization" field in the "Contacts" table and the name of the organization in the "Organization" table. But I need to see if there's a way to select the organization in the "Contact Details" form in such a way that the person can see which branch they are selecting.

Please see the link to the template below:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/te...001225343.aspx

Thanks in advance,
Martin

[orange]

There is a free data model here that may give you some ideas.

[ssanfu]

The MS template is not split. Is every employee going to have their own personal contact manager or will everyone need to see ALL of the contacts? If everyone need to see ALL of the contacts, then you need to split the dB and everyone have a copy of the FE on their individual computer.

Are you calling the "Company" field the "organization", or are you wanting to add an organization field?
Since this is temporary, there is no reason you cannot have the organization as entries like "ESPN Mexico" or "ESPN Argentina". This is propably the easiest method. The problem is that these "temporary" programs tend to become "temporarily permanent".

You can add an Organization with fields "org_ID_PK", "org_name" and "sub_org". Then modify the table, queries, forms and reports to add the two fields. Not too hard....


What about using "Outlook" as your temporary contact manager? You can set up an address book just for specific contacts....