J
Jason
Hi everyone,
First the background
First time poster and relatively new to Access (have taken one class in
it and I'm a psychology researcher with SOME computer experience, but
I'm a far cry from a programmer/data manager type) so forgive the
potentially stupid question I'm about to ask.
I've been asked to design a database for a medical study I'm working on
and Access is what we have to use.
The primary problem I have right now is with the actual basic design of
it - most of the technical aspects of setting up tables/forms/etc. I
think I can do.
Essentially what we want is a single GIANT table (300 participants with
about 2500 variables each). Obviously that has to be broken down into
many smaller tables, which is fine.
The PROBLEM that I'm having is that each participant will have a single
ID# and I want that number to be the same across every table. For
forms, I'd like to have people select the participant by # at the top
of the form, and then be able to click a button below to bring up a
form allowing them to edit that record.
I know that probably sounds confusing, but an example would be, there
is say participant 003 and their contact info entered into the table.
I want to enter their weekly questionnaires in - but the problem is
when I scroll to participant 003 at the top, it only sees it as a part
of the contact info table. How can I "trick" Access into essentially
only having one primary key for records across 50-100 tables?
I use an update query so that when the info is entered for the first
time, it enters "placeholder" IDs in all the tables that match the ID
at the top. However Access does not like having one ID for multiple
tables. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious (I probably am), but how
can I have them select an ID at the top and then pull up the record
with a matching ID value in another table?
Thanks so much for the help and if that didn't make any sense, just let
me know and I'm happy to clarify. Like I said, I'm very new to Access
databases (I'm used to just keeping all data in SPSS) - so there could
be a simple solution I don't know about.
First the background
First time poster and relatively new to Access (have taken one class in
it and I'm a psychology researcher with SOME computer experience, but
I'm a far cry from a programmer/data manager type) so forgive the
potentially stupid question I'm about to ask.
I've been asked to design a database for a medical study I'm working on
and Access is what we have to use.
The primary problem I have right now is with the actual basic design of
it - most of the technical aspects of setting up tables/forms/etc. I
think I can do.
Essentially what we want is a single GIANT table (300 participants with
about 2500 variables each). Obviously that has to be broken down into
many smaller tables, which is fine.
The PROBLEM that I'm having is that each participant will have a single
ID# and I want that number to be the same across every table. For
forms, I'd like to have people select the participant by # at the top
of the form, and then be able to click a button below to bring up a
form allowing them to edit that record.
I know that probably sounds confusing, but an example would be, there
is say participant 003 and their contact info entered into the table.
I want to enter their weekly questionnaires in - but the problem is
when I scroll to participant 003 at the top, it only sees it as a part
of the contact info table. How can I "trick" Access into essentially
only having one primary key for records across 50-100 tables?
I use an update query so that when the info is entered for the first
time, it enters "placeholder" IDs in all the tables that match the ID
at the top. However Access does not like having one ID for multiple
tables. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious (I probably am), but how
can I have them select an ID at the top and then pull up the record
with a matching ID value in another table?
Thanks so much for the help and if that didn't make any sense, just let
me know and I'm happy to clarify. Like I said, I'm very new to Access
databases (I'm used to just keeping all data in SPSS) - so there could
be a simple solution I don't know about.