Microsoft Access DB Build Questions

[NoobinNJ84]

I am hoping someone on here can provide some structural and technical guidance for putting together a database in Access 2010.

I am trying to pull together a database that tracks different awards my club has won. We want to include several fields:

- AwardYear - The year the award was won.

- AwardName - The name of the award

- AwardTagA - A multivalue box where I can associate multiple categories per each Award.

- AwardTagB - A multivalue box where I can associate multiple categories per each Award.

- TagC - A multivalue box where I can associate multiple categories per each Award.

The tags will be fixed lists, so I want the user to pick from choices in each type.

Tell me if this is the right approach.

In my AwardsTable. Fields are AwardYear, AwardName, AwardTags1, AwardTags2...

In my Tags[#] tables I still have only one field per table with several values.

I now should create a form, on the form I create a list box that writes to the AwardTagsA field in the main table but whose values are sourced from the TagsAtable.

Does this make sense? I am running into errors in getting the mutlivalues to write back to this main table. If anyone can help me, I'd really appreciate it. I am a novice and am really struggling with this.

[Seth Schrock]

You should stay away from multi-value fields. See Database Normalization and Table Structures. You should have a table for your different tags and one for your awards (with AwardYear and AwardName). Each of these tables should have a primary key field. You would then create a third table as the join table in this many-to-many relationship you have between the awards and the tags. This table would have two fields with both of them being primary key fields (the combination of the two fields makes a unique value).

Let us know if you have any questions about this.