Access 2010 - imported data from excel - combine two columns into one subform column

Question

I'm totally new with Access, so I'm not sure if I'm going about this the right way, but I'm stuck.

I have an excel file with about 5000 records. Among the data in this file are columns for tracking employment history. Currently there are two sets of columns, "Job Title 1" & "Employer 1" and "Job Title 2" and "Employer 2"

I'd like to use Access to let users add additional employment records. Ideally, I'd like to be able to add Job 3, Job 4 and so on, as required.

I've created a form in Access, and it seems to me that a subform is the best way to insert the employment history. So, I've created a sub form which imports the Job data, but I'm having trouble formatting it.

Right now, I can put Job Title 1 and Job Title 2 into separate columns on the same row, but I'd like to combine them into one 'Job Title' field, and create multiple rows.

If I'm on the right track I could use some help finishing off the subform formatting, or if there's a completely different way to do this I'm open to that too.

Here's a simplified example record:

Name: John Smith

Job Title 1: Reporter

Employer 1: Toronto Star

Job Title 2: Columnist

Employer 2: Toronto Sun

What I want is a table that looks like this, with the option to add additional rows:

Name: John Smith

Job Title / Employer

Reporter / Toronto Star

Columnist / Toronto Sun

Thanks in advance for any help, I hope my explanation was clear, but please let me know

Answer 1

Do not try and reproduce an Excel form in MS Access. You want a table that contains:

PersonID
JobTitle
JobDetails
JobDate

The user will keep adding records to the table in the subform and the date will tell you whether it is job 1 or job n. When you output to Excel, a crosstab query will line up the records into one row, if that is what you need. You might like to read http://r937.com/relational.html, if you have not already read something similar.

To change your existing data into this format, you can use a union query:

 INSERT INTO NewTable (PersonID, JobTitle, Employer)
 SELECT PersonID, JobTitle, Employer FROM
 (SELECT PersonID1 As PersonID, JobTitle1 As JobTitle, Employer1 As Employer
 FROM Table
 UNION ALL
 SELECT PersonID2 As PersonID, JobTitle2 As JobTitle, Employer2 As Employer
 FROM Table)