How can I make a form input for multiple tables in Microsoft Access 2010?

Question

I want to make a form in Access 2010 that would allow me to enter the information about an invoice, and be able to choose the name of a customer, a store, and an employee to associate that invoice with. The customers, stores, and employees are stored in separate tables with mapping tables (i.e. invoice-customer, which just has InvoiceID and CustID) connecting them to invoice.

When I make a form that only makes records for a single table's information, I can use the form to make new records and edit previous records fine, but when I any form I make that has information from other tables, it will only display current records, not make new records or edit them. How can I make a form that works that way?

Answer 1

You may wish to read Fundamentals of Relational Database Design, Paul Litwin, 2003, I suspect you do not need the junction tables for customer, store and employee - junction tables are generally only needed when you can have several of something associated with one of something else, for example, several locations for one invoice.

This would make things a lot easier for you, because you could use comboboxes to allow the user to select these items by name, which would then write the id back to the invoice table.

You might like to look at the Northwind database (nwind.mdb) for some ideas. It ships with all versions of Access.