I seem to have really stirred things up here! :-)

It's so interesting to read the articles suggested and all of your responses.

I have come up against something that may just have forced me to use a
question number in a survey database I am creating. I have the questions in
one table and now am creating the answers table. The kicker is that the
answers have been input in Excel and need to be imported into Access. I will
be relating the answers to the question number. I had initially used an
autonumber questionID, but I'm not sure this will be useful at this point
because there is no such thing in the Excel file.

What there IS in the Excel file is a unique question number (combination of
letters and numbers) for each and every question and these will never change.

Opinions or suggestions? Thanks!
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Thanks!

Dee


"Jamie Collins" wrote:

On Aug 6, 12:21 pm, "BruceM" wrote:
Then they have a problem that they might have avoided with a more "natural"
EmployeeID used as the key, until they decide that since everybody is part
of one company everybody's ID should be the same format. There is no single
best answer

I agree but I think many people see "autonumber primary key" as always
being the answer, the panacea. I'm not sure whether the blame lies
with the "I tend to use Autonumber PKs for most of my tables" brigade
or whether it's Access's "A table must have a primary key for you to
define a relationship between this table and other tables in the
database [incorrect]. Do you want to create a primary key now?" but,
if proposed designs posted in these groups are anything to go by,
consideration of candidate keys tends to go no further than
"autonumber primary key"

Jamie.

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