Table/Filter to show certain months

[Nichole P]

I have a table that contains the following fields:

Mailing List ID
First Name
Last Name
Address
City
State
Zip
Birthday Day
Child 1 Name
Child 1 DOB
Child 2 Name
Child 2 DOB
Child 3 Name
Child 3 DOB

I need to filter for one month at a time by date of birth. I need to see all
months regardless of the year. I need to be able to do this on all the
fields that contain a date of birth for each member. How would I do this if I
run a query, etc. I hope my question makes sense. I basically want to see
only the accounts that have a date of birth in Oct or in Nov., etc.

 

[Jeff Boyce]

Nichole

Your design is well-suited ... for a spreadsheet! As a relational database,
Access offers features and functions that aren't available in Excel (and
don't work as well if you feed Access 'sheet data).

If a person in your mailing list has more than 3 children, you will have to
modify your current table design, and any queries based on it, and any
forms, and any reports, and any macros, and any code... Are you sure you
want to take on that degree of maintenance?!

You've already discovered one of the reasons not to design your tables with
"repeating fields" -- you have to figure out some way to check all the
repeating fields for a value.

Here's another approach:

tblParent
ParentID
FirstName
LastName
...(address fields)

trelChild
ChildID
ParentID (this is a foreign key, pointing back to the Parent of this
Child)
FirstName
LastName (note ... not every child has his/her parents' lastname)
DOB
...

With this table structure, you only need to look in the child DOB column to
find specific date ranges. You can use a query to do this, and to link back
to the parent and address.

Further complications: more than one parent; more than one address.

Good luck!

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Office/Access MVP