Access Cookbook

Use a Field in One Table to Update a Field in Another Table

Problem

You’ve imported a table that contains updated prices for some of the records in a table in your database. The data in all the other fields in the existing table is still correct. Is there any way—short of using a complex VBA procedure—to update the price data in the existing table based on the updated prices from the imported table without overwriting any of the other fields in the existing table?

Solution

You probably already know that you can use an update query to update the values of fields in a table, but did you know that you can use an update query to update the values in one table with the values from another? This solution will show you how to do just that. If you can join the two tables on some common field or combination of fields, you can use an update query to update a field in one table based on the values found in a second table.

Here are the steps to create an update query that updates values across tables:

1. Create a standard Select query. Add the two tables to the query and join them on the common field or fields. In the sample database, we added the tblAlbums and tblAlbumsUpdated tables to the query. We will refer to tblAlbumsUpdated as the source table because it will supply the values to be used to update the other table; tblAlbums is the target table because it will be the target of the updates. Access has automatically joined the two tables on AlbumID. If the name of the common field is not ...