Trying to reduce number of fields

[dallin]

Hi all! First-timer, my name's Brett



Just wondering if anyone can offer some assistance in overcoming an obstacle I'm having with constructing an Access 2007 database. I confess I'm a bit of a newbie with relational databases but I do tend to pick up stuff quickly... the difficulty I'm having in this case is trying to find prior examples of work that are applicable to my particular scenario.

I'm building a database for a repair workshop. The primary idea to begin with is to have a way of recording repair details for jobs, largely by way of check boxes eg "replace x part" and multiple-choice selections for things like test results eg pass/fail.

As you can imagine, if I simply have a whole heap of yes/no fields the table gets very big very quickly, especially when I start considering this for multiple products (this is designed to cover repairs to about ten different products, all with their own set of standard repairs).

After talking to a couple of people, one suggestion that came through was to have a question/answer table with question ID's referring to specific repair procedures. To my newbie mind this seems to make sense as instead of having lots of fields it would just have an ID, job number, question ID and answer fields, but I can't get my head around how to implement it into a form.

Is anyone able to offer some advice on this? Or point me towards reading material on constructing this? I've tried looking but it's difficult to phrase my question in such a way as to get much in the way of google results!

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

~ Brett

[burrina]

Welcome. First, you need to have a clear picture of what you want to achieve. Write down on paper a diagram of your design. It's like building a house, foundation first.
As an Example:
Tables first, then queries, then forms.

tblProducts
tblParts
tlbProcedures

Post back if you need more help.

HTH