Forum Discussion
Adding sub form for a new year
I just realized that when I copied the files into one table from the many yearly tables, the records are reordering themselves by the record number. How do I prevent the reordering. I want them by "Year Dues Date."
When you look directly at a table in Access, the records do not have a guaranteed order. Access will usually just show them in the order they were created, or by the autonumber field, but that can change. Tables are meant for storing the data, not for controlling how it looks.
If you want your records to always show by Year Dues Date, the way to do that is with a query (or a form or report based on that query). Just create a query on your table, add the Year Dues Date field, and then sort by that field. That way you will always see the data in the order you want.
I also strongly recommend that you do not use spaces in your field names or table names. It might seem fine now, but it will cause you problems later when you start writing queries or VBA code. Use something like YearDuesDate instead of Year Dues Date.
It might also help to go through a good beginner tutorial or book on Access. There are plenty of free resources on YouTube, or you can find books that walk you through the basics step by step. That foundation will make it much easier to build your database the right way from the start.
I have been watching your videos, playing, and learning a lot. I realize that in the many dues tables (one for each year) the previous person used an autonumber for the primary key. The primary key counted the number of dues paid for each year which I don't need except that it is a unique number. When I copy several years into a new table, they get new primary key numbers for the dues table. The foreign key number is the membership key number and it does not change. Does this cause any problems in relating the dues to the proper member in the membership table?
I really appreciate your suggestions. I took your 4 hour beginner class, but plan on going through it again. I know that you say that names should not have spaces and if I were starting from scratch that is what I would do, but I did not create this database and I am just trying to figure out how it works. Anything that I would add I would not use spaces. Thank you.
