Questions About Microsoft Access

[William Pierce]

First off, I'm not sure if this is the correct thread to be posting in so if I need to delete and re-post in a better location please let me know.

Now on to the questions I have. I work at a Winery and have recently taken over the reporting side of things and I was thinking that access would be perfect for what I'm doing (making use of spreadsheets that could be connected). I will give an example of the spreadsheet that I would like to try and mimic. My goal is to create a forum that I can enter a few different variables in and from those variables it will fill in the following blanks (PLN,TIN,Address,state,zip,ext.). I want to be able to enter the Store name and then from that it would auto pull up the above stats. Is this possible from just one drop-down menu? I would assume so, as all these stats are connected.

Image of what i want it to look like.

[pbaldy]

Does this help?

http://www.baldyweb.com/Autofill.htm

[William Pierce]

Thank you pbaldy for the quick response. I am very new to Access, so you might have to right answer, but I'm not familiar in how to place that into action. my hope is to select the location of the site I'm moving wine to, and from that choice the following blanks will then be filled in from the rest of the data in that row. The only variables I want to be-able to edit are the Types of wine, the amount of that wine, and the cost of that wine.
here is how my forum is looking right now.


The arrows indicate which values I want to edit by hand and the rest I'm hoping to link to the location name. If i can help explain the situation any more please ask any questions.

[orange]

Some of the links in this post may be helpful with design and planning.
I recommend you get your tables designed to meet your requirements before jumping too quickly in to form and report design.

Good luck and welcome to the forum.

[pbaldy]

Should you need code, it would go here:

http://www.baldyweb.com/FirstVBA.htm

But note the link talking about normalization, and not saving all of that data.

[ssanfu]

Welcome to the forums.

First thing you must understand is that Access is not Excel. There might be a form set up as a data grid that LOOKs like a spreadsheet, but it is NOT a spreadsheet.

I am stealing the following from a post from Rod from 8/8/2012:
"Rule zero!

"The time spent analyzing and planning your project before you even 'put finger to keyboard' is repaid fourfold later in the development."

So, what should be done in this planning stage?

Define what your project should do. This is usually a list of the main reports and their content. Sometimes projects do things other than report so define these if appropriate.
Define your first thoughts on how the information is to be entered, by whom, how frequently.
Is this envisaged as a single-user project (you can have multiple stand-alone copies) or is it a multi-user project with shared data?
Analyse your data. If you are inexperienced or if the project is large then I would recommend producing an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) before attempting to design a relational database. The ERD will help you further understand your data.
Only then produce a first draft database design - either on paper or use Access to draw it nicely. Test the design by walking through 1, 2 and 3 above to answer how the design fulfills the requirements.
Now you're ready to start.
"



PS Read up on and adopt a naming convention (suggest Reddick) and a set of standards (not familiar with any published ones - just follow what you like of other people's work) from the start.