How to populing tables and how to view subsheets

Hi

I am new to Access and need to design an contact database. I have 3 tables -
Contact details, Investor details and Visit Reports. They all contain the
same companies but not all of the ones in Contact Details will have an entry
in Investor Details (some will be standard contacts and some will be
potential investors and so I need additional info on them) but when I look at
the Investor details I need to see the address and country but this is in
Contact details and so I know I shouldn't duplicate? How do I view this info
in Investor Details?
Also - we have several contact names per company and so I want to have a
subset of all the individuals by company in the Contact Details table - how
is this done?

Many thanks in advance - sorry for the poor explanation

On Jul 16, 2:48 pm, td wrote:
Hi

I am new to Access and need to design an contact database. I have 3 tables -
Contact details, Investor details and Visit Reports. They all contain the
same companies but not all of the ones in Contact Details will have an entry
in Investor Details (some will be standard contacts and some will be
potential investors and so I need additional info on them) but when I look at
the Investor details I need to see the address and country but this is in
Contact details and so I know I shouldn't duplicate? How do I view this info
in Investor Details?
Also - we have several contact names per company and so I want to have a
subset of all the individuals by company in the Contact Details table - how
is this done?

Many thanks in advance - sorry for the poor explanation

First, welcome! This is a great place to get help, a lot of very
smart people here. Fortunately they don't exclude me from posting
I think I generally understand what you're saying. I would recommend
mapping it out visually, and instead of first worrying about tables,
think about abstract entities (which often turn out to become tables,
not always, though).

So you have:

Contacts, which are individual people. A contact has the following
attributes:
-Is associated with a Company
-Has an address Address (which I am assuming may be different from the
Company, generally a sound way to create a contact database)
-Country (same as above)
-Some other set of unique attributes

You said that investors are contacts, but I'm curious if it is the
company that will be investing, or the individuals within a company?
That will drive your design a bit. If an investor is really an
individual, then you will probably want to add the Investor attributes
to the Contact table. Some contacts will have investor details
populated, others won't. When you go to design your forms, that will
be important in terms of how you display the information to a user.
You may want to create a boolean field "Investor" in the Contact
table, which will then indicate whether to show or hide specific
information in your contact forms. You can also use that field to
filter to see just investors or non-investors.

So the net is, you probably only need two tables if I understand you
correctly. Companies and Contacts. Some contacts will be investors,
some won't be.

Hope this helps!

Brandon Smith-Daigle
http://accesspro.blogspot.com (access tips for non-programmers)