Help for coworker please

[Guest]

a coworker has an access DB that she has copied over year and year. ie
CLients 2005, copied to be CLients 2006, each year addes the current year
data. It appears that today when she did this, not all the data came over.
THere were mnany blanks in the center of her db. I am not access proficient
beyond, copy and paste and import export, none of these work, even taking a
good copy from her back up - all return the same thing, missing info.

I wonder if access has a size limitation for db's? We have tried copying
the data with teh copy paste command and renaming as clients 2006, but
nothing works, any suggestions?

Thans in advance,

 

[Rick B]

First, why is she doing this? This is not normalized. Instead, use one
database and add a date field to your records. Then you can easily see
records from this year, last year, five years ago, or ALL records from one
file.

Instead of copying the file this year, just go add a date to the table
containing the transactions and keep working in the same file. She should
also build an append query to append all the old records from her previous
databases into the current one (just make sure to set the appropriate date
in the records before appending them).

What if a particular client sticks with her for several years? Is she
re-adding it every year? Yikes!

If the year really does not matter, another option would be to add an
"inactive" checkbox or date field to your client table. Then, when a client
leaves you, simply mark them as inactive. They are still there, so you can
run reports or reactivate them, but they can easily be excluded from your
reports or picklists.

This will result in a "normalized" database.

It sounds like your coworker is trying to use Access as a fancy spreadsheet.
Access is not a spreadsheet, it is a relational database product. If she
just wants a spreadsheet, she should use Excel.

Just curious, you ask if the file is too big, but you don't tell us how big
the file is.