Steve

I'm with John on this...

Adding another field to handle another month means you'll always be
maintaining the application, updating the table structure, the queries, the
forms, the reports, etc.

Moreover, since Access is optimized for well-normalized data, if you try to
feed it 'sheet data, both you and Access will have to work overtime to come
up with (unnecessary) work-arounds.

I suspect that folks with experience using Excel before considering Access
have a BIGGER task coming up to speed, as they have to unlearn some of what
they've been doing if they want to make good/efficient/effective use of the
tool.

Best of luck!

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Access MVP

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"Steve D" wrote in message
...
I get what you are saying but I would like to understand better how the
database works. Why is it better to use the full date and have many
records
than to use one table with 12 months and one table with the years?
I felt like I needed the Year table. I am using the database to manage the
budget and forecast cycles, so I have a table called tblCycle and I wanted
to
be able to relate that with a year so I would be able to pull the 2007
budget, etc.., but now I think I could just query using the month field or
Year([dtmMonth)].

Am I on the right path?
--
Thank You,
Steve


"John W. Vinson" wrote:

On Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:07:01 -0700, Steve D

wrote:

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?

Even more strongly, yes.

You can crosstab by year using Year([datefield]) as the Column Head - or
by
year and month using Format([datefield], "yyyy-mm"), or by week using
DatePart([datefield], "ww"). Like I said, great flexibility!
--

John W. Vinson [MVP]
.