Records change order

[accessbeginner]

Hi - I am hoping some one is able to help me with my query. I am a total novice when it somes to access. I have created a database by following instructions from a book I got out of the library and have impressed myself that I have got this far without yet asking for help. I will try and explain my problem without confusing you

We collect and deliver wheat and other commodities and have a diary to log which lorries have collected from x and taken to y, what they were carrying and how much it weighed. We also have coloumns for invoice numbers and self billing numbers and also tickets numbers plus others. In all there are about 20+ coloumns. The date, lorry reg, commodity, collected from and collected to along with contract numbers and prices are entered each day. So one record will be entered then down to the next record so all the coloumns are not completed initially. It can be as much as a week before all the tickets are handed in by the drivers, and then entered on to the database. However although the records stay in date order (there could be a block of about 15 of them all with the same date) they seem to move around. When it comes to enter the ticket numbers and weights etc, once the database has been closed down for the night, the order has changed. (I should have mentioned from the start that the log is first written manually in a day per page diary - then copied to the database. Just until we know the database is correct) So when new information is being entered and follow the order of the entries in the manual diary, they are not the same. So we end up having to scroll up and down the form looking for the correct entry.

This all used to be done on excel but only one person could use it and update it at once and there are several times when more than one of us needs to be using it. I imported what we already had into an access table and then created a form. The data moves in both the table and the form.

Can anyone suggest why this order is changing? The fields that do not have any data in them are blank. Do I need to put a 0 in or some other character until the relevant information is entered?

I hope I have explained this clear enough for you and thank you in advance.

[NTC]

fundamentally records are records and there is no such thing as any order to a database. you order or sort them as you wish i.e. ascending or descending based on any column or combination of columns as you wish - - that is the power of a db. in a table/form one can highlight/right click and sort....for a form - there is an underlying record source; if that record source is a query - you can implement the sort in the query; you can also implement an OrderBy in the form's property....so there are quite a few ways to control it.