I am ultimately going to want to use a crosstab query that will show multiple
years in the rows. Do you still suggest using date/time?
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Thank You,
Steve


"John W. Vinson" wrote:

On Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:20:01 -0700, Steve D
wrote:

Good Afternoon,
I have a very basic question regarding the organization of my table. I
will have monthly data that will be entered and it will be for various years.
Is it better to use one field called month and do a crosstab query or should
I have 12 fields (one for each month)? My thought is that it is cleaner if
each month has its own record but then I will have 12 times the number of
records. Thoughts? Best Practices?

Absolutely and unquestionably, one record per month. "Fields are expensive,
records are cheap"!

In fact, I would NOT use a "month" field, either monthname or month number;
instead use a Date/Time field. You must enter a complete date, but October
2009 data can be entered with a date field of #10/1/2009#, and so on; Access'
date handling is pretty good and this will let you slice and dice the data
chronologically with a lot of flexibility.


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John W. Vinson [MVP]
.