Perhaps a simple problem?

[Guest]

Hi guys. I'm still quite new to access and I kinda need some help on this. I
made a form containing a tab control at the bottom. There's 3 pages to this
tab control and for every page on it, I inserted a subform. Meaning to say
that there's altogether 3 subforms in all.

Inside every subform, I inserted a tab control containing for 3 or 4 pages.
I've linked the Main form to the different sub forms.

The whole idea is having to display all the details on 1 FORM. Not having
any buttons linking to other forms.

Is there a way whereby I can search the records at the Main form and it's
reflected on the tab page in the subform? I hope someone can help me on this.

 

[Guest]

Hi

You can link all the forms by "£Carefully" linking Child and Master fields
on "each form".

But

As I see it (may be wrong).
You have a main form
On the main form you have a 3 tabs (thats 4 forms in all)
On each tab you have 4 tabs (thats 13 forms in all)

I think for a user 13 forms may be a little too much "unless" your form
design is very good.

 

[Guest]

Oh ok. The reason i'm using several forms is that I'm required to have quite
a number of fields.

Can you give me suggetions on how I can make it more simpler? Perhaps using
less forms. Any sample designs I can look at?

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

Before trying to solve your problem, I suggest to buy and read a book on
database design. I can recommend:

Database Design for Mere Mortals by Michael J. Hernandez

It is very rare that any useful table has more than perhaps 30 fields. Most
of mine have 5 to 10 fields. Although by no means perfect, the Northwind
sample database that comes with Access is a design start for you to look at.

 

[John W. Vinson]

Oh ok. The reason i'm using several forms is that I'm required to have quite
a number of fields.

How many fields in your widest table? I fear you may have fallen into the trap
of "committing spreadsheet"; if you have fieldnames like January, February,
March or Agent1, Agent2, Agent3 etc., you may be on the wrong track.
Designing your table structure to match a paper form will almost surely give
you an *extremely badly normalized* table! It's much better to create
tall-thin, properly normalized tables and adapt the form to them rather than
vice versa!

John W. Vinson [MVP]