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Old November 16th, 2004, 02:18 AM
John Vinson
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On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 13:57:27 -0800, "el zorro"
wrote:

SO I've read a little thing that warns against using the
LOOKUP feature when designing tables. Apparently its not
good to assign values to a field based on values in
another table; better to just join the tables in a query
and get your values that way.

But what about using the VALUE LIST lookup option when
designing a table? This does not reference another table,
but you just type in the list of values from which you
want the user to select. For example, I might want to
limit data for a Status field to "Approved," "Pending."
and "Denied." SO rather than creating a separate table
for these 3 entries, I just type them in to the table
design, via the LOOKUP feature. Any harm in that?
(Thanks!)


If you reread the rant against Lookup Fields you'll see that it is NOT
objecting to using combo boxes (whether table based or list-of-values)
for entering data. It's perfectly routine to do so, and good
practice... ON FORMS, which is where data entry should be done.

In my opinion the worst disadvantage of Lookup Fields is that it keeps
people tied to using table datasheets for data entry, rather than
moving to Forms. Forms are much more capable and controllable than
table datasheets - and you can freely use combo boxes on Forms.

John W. Vinson[MVP]
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