Best practices for creating a form with many nested subforms?

[transliminal]

Hi there,

I have a database designed to store words in a bilingual English<>Arabic dictionary.

Each word (i.e., record) in each of the two languages has quite a bit of (largely optional) 'metadata' that is stored and organized across a large number of one-to-one and one-to-many child tables. The database is structured this way so as to avoid the alternative problem of having many null variables (since much of the metadata is optional, and hence left blank) sitting in fewer, but larger, de-normalized tables.

I want to create a form that allows me to enter *all* the possible 'metadata' for each word. However, in total, if you add up all the fields of all the relevant tables, it's greater than 255.

The best design option in this case--I'm assuming--is to use (nested) subforms.

However, when i try to implement this, it seems unwieldy, and also very difficult to organize visually.

Do you have any suggestions in terms of workflow, design, etc., for how best to go about constructing this type of form?

Thank you in advance for any insight.

(PS Attached is a screenshot of the Relationships view, to give you a sense of the number of tables)

[ranman256]

the best practice..
1 master form,
1 subform,
and at MAX, 1 sub-sub-form.

any more and its just confusing. I would skip the sub-sub-form and use tab control so user can easily change sub-forms.

[ArviLaanemets]

An extremly simplified example