I need some series help with Access ... please help

[mr1371]

Okay, I'm completely new to Access, so it's going to be hard for me to even explain this question, but I'm going to try my best. I'm trying to create a database for my sports card inventory. Now, here's the problem. I really want to make an easy to use, efficient database. One of the things I'd like to do is make one field respond to the input of another. I'd like to make one field for the sport (in this field I would have a list of sports including baseball, basketball, football, etc.) , now if I chose football for instance, I have another field for the player's position. Would it be possible for me to have the values in the "position" field? So, if I chose football, the positions in the "positions" field would be linebacker, quarterback, center, etc. , or if I chose baseball, the positions listed would be different and would be pitcher, catcher, first baseman, etc.

Is there anyway to do this? If so, please explain it to me as simply as you can.

Thank you so much,


Justin

[John_G]

Hi Justin -

I think you are getting ahead of yourself. Before you even start with Access, you need to sit down with pencil and paper, and analyze the real-world situation you want to model (sports card collection in your case). Determine what Entities you have (which are Tables in Access), what the properties of those entities are (fields in MS Access), and the relationships between them. You might be surprised how many entities you actually have. e.g. Card, Company, Sport, etc.

Remember that MS Access is only a tool; an improperly designed database won't work well no matter what tool is used to implement it.

The Web has a ton of information on designing databases; here are a couple of examples I got from putting Designing a good database into a search engine:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ac...005189136.aspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ac...001224247.aspx

I have one or two others at home which I will post a bit later.

John

[mr1371]

Thanks, John ... Those links are great! I'll definitely get the pencil and paper started and see what I have.

Thanks again
Justin