I am trying to put all my college students files into a database to better
keep track of them. I am new to the access world and am curious what is the
best way to deal with the fact that students can take many, many, many
classes. Do I just create say 100 fields of courses taken? There has to be a
way to make a "floating" number of fields depending on how many courses they
take, or maybe there doesn't have to be. Any advice?
Thanks

If you're using Access 2003, take a look at this template from Microsoft ...

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/te...CT011366821033

In particular, study the relationships between the 'Classes' and 'Students'
tables and the 'Students and Classes' table.

--
Brendan Reynolds
Access MVP

"Chris" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:FFBB6DAE-1C83-4977-9679-(E-Mail Removed)...
>I am trying to put all my college students files into a database to better
> keep track of them. I am new to the access world and am curious what is
> the
> best way to deal with the fact that students can take many, many, many
> classes. Do I just create say 100 fields of courses taken? There has to be
> a
> way to make a "floating" number of fields depending on how many courses
> they
> take, or maybe there doesn't have to be. Any advice?
> Thanks

One table is not the route to take!!!!!!

You'll need to create 1 table that will house your student general info
(name, id, address,...) then you'll need to create 1 table to house their
courses and you'll need to link the 2 tables together by a common piece of
info such as their id

It will look something like:

Table1
StudentID
FirstName
LastName
Address
City
State
PostalCode
....

Table 2
StudentID
CourseNumber

This will be a 1-to-Many relationship meaning for every entry in Table 1
there can be many entries in Table 2

Look in the help section of Access they give a simple example.

Hope this helps to get you started,

Daniel


"Chris" wrote:

> I am trying to put all my college students files into a database to better
> keep track of them. I am new to the access world and am curious what is the
> best way to deal with the fact that students can take many, many, many
> classes. Do I just create say 100 fields of courses taken? There has to be a
> way to make a "floating" number of fields depending on how many courses they
> take, or maybe there doesn't have to be. Any advice?
> Thanks