Is it possible to use key phrases?

[pgnl]

I am a fairly inexperienced user of Access 2000 with next to no Visual Basic programming experience, but so far I have been able to solve most problems.

I am in the process of creating a new database for customer complaints, basically each complaint record will need a number of keywords or phrases like, 'Errors made', 'Not a valid complaint', 'Innacuracies' (total of about 15 in all). Each record may have several keyphrases associated with it. The idea being so that we can analyse the number and nature of complaints received.

Can you suggest a fairly simple way of doing this? Would you suggest I have a radio on/off button for each item? Alternatively, is it possible to have a list that you can select multiple items by holding down the control key. Would it be necessary to have separate fields for each phrase or could you have multiple phrases in one field?

Any ideas guys?

Thanks for your help.

 

[jdegeorge]

I would suggest, most importantly, that you have a relational database with normalized tables. In case you are not familiar with this concept, you would have many smaller tables with common fields that share information, rather than one large table with everything in it, which could contain needless repetetive information (much like this run-on sentence!!).

Anywho, you should have a table for complaint types. Name it tblComplaintType and have at least two fields: Complaint_ID (autonumber field, primary key to maintain uniqueness), and Complaint_Type (text field, indexed for no duplicates).

Then, in your Complaint table, you can have a numeric field called Complaint_ID that is based on a lookup of tblComplaintType. You can set this in the table field property.

Hope this helps.

Jim "Get it right the first time, that's the main thing..."

 

[pgnl]

Presumably the result would be similar to a Combo Box with a drop down list. (I've already got several of those..) But how can I select more than one entry in the list?

And then add up the totals of each type of complaint for analysis.

I think I might have bitten off a bit more than I can chew here! Trouble is, I can always think of ideas, but sometimes struggles with the basics.

Thanks for your help anyway..

Patrick
UK