Decisions

[Guest]

I'm trying to create a scenario such that the city where the customer lives
is selected from a drop-down box. When I select the city I want the table to
auto-poulate with three other elements such as the name of the electric
company, the name of the telephone company and the cable tv provider.
Obviously I'd need a table or something that will establish the connection
between a particular city and the the service providers.

I just do not know which way to go to get this started and have it update
demographic table of customers.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

K

 

[Jeff Boyce]

Ken

If we take your description literally ("when I select the city I want the
table to auto-populate with ..."), DON'T DO IT!

If you already have the electric company name, phone company name and cable
provider name in a table somewhere, don't redundantly enter it in another
table. Access is a relational database, and this means you'll only need to
have some way to relate your city to those "names" in another table.

And since a City could be "Aberdeen" or "Paris" or some other name that can
have multiple cities in multiple states, you don't want to use CityName to
link these.

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Office/Access MVP

 

[Joseph Meehan]

I'm trying to create a scenario such that the city where the customer
lives is selected from a drop-down box. When I select the city I want
the table to auto-poulate with three other elements such as the name
of the electric company, the name of the telephone company and the
cable tv provider. Obviously I'd need a table or something that will
establish the connection between a particular city and the the
service providers.

I just do not know which way to go to get this started and have it
update demographic table of customers.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

K

I can't be sure, but it sounds like you are about to commit the
spreadsheet sin.

In a relational database like Access you don't store information
repeatedly. You may record the city or even just a reference number as a
link to another table where that information is stored.

 

[Guest]

Some times the more advanced of us forget we all make rookie mistakes. But
they are correct about reduntant info.

One of the delimas is duplicate info being entered.

I have a complex data base where I have several items tied together. I
simplied them by assigning them codes. For example brand names - BB is the
code for Big Bang Fireworks. And Category #1 is for Sparklers. So I can
input the info in my form with these simplified versions of the names and
later when I need to recall the info in a report I can query the correct info.

You might try to assign codes to the utility companies and then instead of
out populating, again to avoid Paris, Tx and Paris France from getting the
same info, do a simple combo box where ABC = A Better Cable Company'; SBC =
South Western Bell Company extc.

I suggest setting up tables for each utilites with their Name, Code Name,
Address, Phone, Etc. In your form fields, only enter the codes. Make Access
pull the data later as you need based on the relationships of ABC and SBC to
the cities.

I hope this helps.