Hi Karl,

You’ve answered a bulk of my questions so a special thanks to you. I sure
appreciate all the contributions you make. You’re always helping everyone
out.

project number in my data table will be truncated. I know that it will be
impossible to establish referential integrity
Use an Autonumber field as primary key field and long integer as foreign key
to maintain integerity.

*****I was hoping that you could enlighten me about using the autonumber.
Please keep in mind I’m fairly new to this. To me, the autonumber is just
some meaningless number. So why would I want to use it as a primary key and
then take the time to label a field with this number in my data table? It
will take a considerable amount of time to assign this number to each of my
projects in the data table. Is there a way to make Access do this for me?
I’ve never been able to grasp this concept.

Should I separate the data into two tables (billable and nonbillable)?
One table with added field to indicate billable and nonbillable.
*****Excellent idea about keeping my data in one table and adding a category
field.

Thanks again for your input.


"KARL DEWEY" wrote:

project number in my data table will be truncated. I know that it will be
impossible to establish referential integrity
Use an Autonumber field as primary key field and long integer as foreign key
to maintain integerity.

Should I separate the data into two tables (billable and nonbillable)?
One table with added field to indicate billable and nonbillable.

--
Build a little, test a little.


"AccessKay" wrote:

I’m about to finish my first database and am in the planning stages to create
another. I want to express my gratitude to all that helped me with this. I
learned more with the help of this group in three months than in three years
of reading books and taking classes. I have the utmost respect for all of
you kind people. I just hope that I’ll be able to find you all when they
close down this site.

I need some guidance about my table set-up. I’m going to have a data table
that will be updated each month for employee, project and hours worked. I
want to have a master table for projects and would like to have a one-to-many
relationship with my data table so that if a new project pops up in my data
table, I’ll know about it. I have two obstacles about doing this.

1. Sometimes the project number in my data table will be truncated. I know
that it will be impossible to establish referential integrity so what’s a
good way of handling this. The only idea I have which I have not tried
before is to do an update query on my data table to add the missing parts but
not sure how to go about doing this.

2. My projects that are nonbilliable will remain the same from month to
month but new billable projects will be added monthly. These will not be in
my master project table. Should I separate the data into two tables
(billable and nonbillable)? Would this be best?

Thank you very much for any suggestions.