Relationships and other general help

[RoundTrip]

Hello all again, so I have been reading on the microsoft site on the access part about a few things and I am kinda confused on certain things and if someone does not mind clearing these questions up for me it would be great.
1.)What exactly is a relationship for? And what is the difference between one to many and many to many relationships? Do you have to have more than one table to incorporate relationships?
2.)What exactly does the primary and foreign keys do? Are they needed?
I am sorry ahead of time if you guys think I am just plain dumb, but I am as new to Access as a thief is being honest and Microsoft's site does not really explain it on my level of what I am trying to comprehend.

[June7]

Tables have relationships (as defined by PK and FK fields) so you don't have a single giant flat file with a lot of repetitive data (like a spreadsheet).

1 to many: each employee can have many travel expense claims but each travel expense claim will be for only 1 employee

many to many: each employee will have many pay periods and each pay period will have many employees

Yes, PK and FK fields are necessary to define the relationship between tables.

Whether relationship links should be set up in the Relationships builder is another issue with divergent viewpoints. This is not relevant to the data structure of tables. Database can work just fine without the established links.

[orange]

Watch the free videos listed here

[RoundTrip]

Thankyou both, I'll be watching and thankyou for answering my question

[Xipooo]

Watch the free videos listed here

I aspire to one day be on that list.