I looked at the excerpt you sent - not sure what you are referring to in as far as 'normalizing to get rid of repeating groups' though. When I viewed the associated form, there are only 2 that calculated, the other 4 were zero value. In the form, anything in description that is all in caps is a room designation, everything else is equipment that uses power and needs to be calculated. The equation for calculations is based off of the PH factor...anything that is a PH of 3 is WATTHRS=QTY*Volts*AMPS*HRS*UF*DF*1.73. If PH=1 (or in rare cases 2), then the equation would be the same, except for the *1.73 at the end. Have I succeeded in total confusion for you?This is all the data I have to work with. The prior programmer did this in DOS back in 1988, and can't be contacted for help, so I'm trying to get this converted into Access and to be as user friendly as possible, since several people will be using it. The calculation for this particular segment has me totally stumped - if I can ever figure it out, or even a work-around, I can do the rest of the calculations, reports, etc, with switchboarding. I haven't worked in DOS for more than 20 years, and because of locks, can't get into the programming to see how it was done. Plus, all company records for the past 30 years are in there, and I don't want to jeopardize corrupting it and losing everything. I'm just hoping someone out there can help me with a solution to this. I've worked in Access enough to know that "nothing is impossible", just a matter of "tricking" it to give the results you want. I've just not found that trick yet for this equation. I had thought as a last resort of doing this portion in Excel, converting formulae to number, then importing to Access. But that's an "iffy" solution, not to mention somewhat time consuming.
Thanks for any input you can give me!