Best Practices Memo Field

[SMERTZ]

What are the best practices for memo fields? Is it OK to have 2 or 3 in a
table? I am trying to build a database, and a related table might have
service records in it. A tech may visit or work on a situation 2 or 3 times
before it is completed. I'm wondering if I should have 3 or 4 memo fields?
Or will that cause problems? I was thinking I could simply have one memo
field and each time it is edited append to the end of it, and place a date /
time stamp there to help parse the file and also know which part was added
when.

Any thoughts are appreciated

Access 2003.

Thanks

 

[Paul Overway]

Your first thought will be problematic the first time you have 5 or more
visits....which would be bad planning on your part. Your other thought is
also problematic in that there may be information embedded within the memo
field that you'd like to query later on. For example, maybe you'd want to
query for service calls conducted on a particular date...who did them, etc.

Rather that create multiple fields, you should create multiple records. For
each service incident, you would have one to many service calls. I'm not
sure what information you're capturing in the memo field and whether you've
given enough thought to what information you might want to query for...but
if you need to query for it, it should probably be in a field.