Add more than 255 rows?

[Guest]

I have to make a table with more than 255 field and all fields are important.
Most of the fields show data imported from excel and some fields show data
entered manually. I have to add about 30 more fields. Access won't allow me
to add more than 255 fields. Can someone give me any advice on what to do.

Thanks

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

You're using a relational database now, not Excel. A table with that many
fields is extremely unusual in a relational database: 30 or 40 fields is
considered a large table.

I think you may want to look into Database Normalization techniques. Jeff
Conrad has a lot of good references to this topic at
http://home.bendbroadband.com/conradsystems/accessjunkie/resources.html#DatabaseDesign101

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

First I would assess if you really need that many fields, in most cases (in
fact every case I've ever seen) you do not. Because Excel is a single flat
file database, it must use columns where a relational database can use rows
in another table. For instance the field Phone number. In Excel, you'd use a
column for each possible phone number. You could easily use 10 or more
columns. In Access, a phone table with 3 fields (PersonID, PhoneType, and
PhoneNumber) can handle thousands (or more) of phones for each person.

By appending your data properly, you should find that you probably can get
by with 30 columns or less.

For sake of argument (and bad design), lets assume you cannot and still need
that many columns. Create a 2nd table with a primary key, which has the same
value as the record in Table1. Now you can add another 254 columns.
--
Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP
Microsoft Access
Free Access downloads:
http://www.datastrat.com
http://www.mvps.org/access