Hi -

From the example data you have shown it looks as if the 5 "items" all refer
to (or are properties of) the same thing - but what what is that "thing" or
in database-ese that entity? A meeting? a project?

When designing a database, the first thing you need to do is determine what
your "entities" are (which will eventually become tables), and what the
properties of those entities are - these "properties" will eventually become
fields in your tables.

Some examples of entities: Cars, Investments, Employees, Stars, CD's .....
this list is endless.

Examples of properties of an entity, for example Cars:
Make
Model
Model year
Colour
Engine power
Purchase Date
Purchase Price
Dealer**
etc, etc

About "dealer" - it too is an entity, with various properties of its own.

Since entities will correspond to tables, each record in that table will
correspond to one occurance of that entity, in this case a car.

Now, you have to be careful sometimes in thinking about what a property of an
entity is. Take for example Employees. Is "Age" a property of an employee?
Well, no it isn't - because "Age" is dependant on (and can be calculated from)
an employee's date of birth. So, the property you would record is DOB, from
which you could calculate Age when you needed to.

So, take a bit of time to look at your data and see what you come up with.
You might be surprised at how many entities you actually have.

Let us know how you do.

Cheers!

John



Mary wrote:
Thank you John,
It is really a small db and should be simple, but I haven't had much
experience setting up a db and appreciate an help you can give me.
The amount values that will be entered into the db are the totals for the
year (going forward we might include quarters, but for now it's just yearly
totals).
Type Item 2009 2008 2007 Average
N Num. attend 234 210 198 214
N Total hours 10.25 20.45 17.65 16.12
P % completed 0.101% 0.035% 0.0125% .049%
C $ spent $500.00 $480.71 $450.90 $477.20
C $ per day $91.93 $89.98 $81.23 $87.71
I would like a simple form that shows each Item, year and amount that the
user can enter new data into.
I also need to create a crosstab query that would display data similar to
how I have it shown above.
Is it possible to create an "average" column in the crosstab query?
Joann

From the sounds of it, you are using the same table to store different type
of data, and this is not usually a good setup. (This is particularly true if
[quoted text clipped - 26 lines]

Thank you for any advice you can give.

--
John Goddard
E-Mail: jrgoddard AT cyberus DOT ca

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