Allen:
Thank you. A follow up question: To complicate things there are
multiple types of revisions...one manual could have three revisions and two
addendums, with the most recent change being the one I would like to track.
I think that I could add a field where one enters the type of revision, i.e.
revision or addendum, and then run the query based upon the most recent
versions date...At least I think? Thank you in advance.

Brian

"Allen Browne" wrote:

One option to consider would be keeping all the versions (originals and
revisions) in the one table.

tblManual table:
ManualID AutoNumber primary key
ManName Text Required, uniquely indexed.

tblVersion table:
ManualID Number foriegn key to tblManual.ManualID
VersionNum Number size Single or Double (or Currency)
VerDate Date/Time when this was version released.
Primary key is the combination of ManualID + VersionNum.

Query to give the current version of your manuals:
SELECT ManualID,
Max(VersionNum) AS CurrentVersion
FROM tblVersion
GROUP BY ManualID
ORDER BY ManualID;

If that sounds okay, I would personally use a Currency field for VersionNum,
because this may prevent problems if you need to use it as a further foreign
key to other tables. Currency is a fixed-point data type, so does not suffer
from floating point matching issues:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floatin...uracy_problems
(Set the Format property of the field so it does not display as dollars and
cents.)

--
Allen Browne - Microsoft MVP. Perth, Western Australia
Tips for Access users - http://allenbrowne.com/tips.html
Reply to group, rather than allenbrowne at mvps dot org.

"Brian Carlson" wrote in message
...
I am in the process of designing a table and I am not sure what the best
way
to approach the design is. In summary, I have one table, lets call it
t_Manuals. This contains the following field ManName, ManDate, and
Man_Revision. This table is full of manuals and for right now they all
have
the value of 0 in the Man_Revision field, becasue they are the originals.
However, I want to be able to track changes to these. I was thinking
that
I would create a table called t_ManRevisions, which would have the same
fields. Each new record would be a record of a revision. I am not sure
how
well this will serve my purpose...at the end of the day I would like to
run a
query that will show all of the Manuals, the most recent revision date for
each, and the revision number for each. Does this design seem solid. It
seems that I could group the query by ManName and then somehow filter to
only
show the most recent? Thank you in advance for any help or tips.