Integrating Excel and Access

Customer Information

The customer information form is probably most easily created by first creating the table to hold the necessary information and then using the Form Wizard from Access. Without complicating matters too much, your first decision is whether to hold all of the customer information in one table or having it in multiple tables. For example, you can have a table that holds only customer names, along with a unique identifier for the customer. You would also have address information, phone information, and company contacts in separate tables.

That approach is preferable for a number of reasons. First, many companies (and even people) have a number of phone numbers. If you designed a database in the mid-1980s, you would probably have only one phone number. When fax machines became popular, if you did not have a separate table, you would have needed to add a field to your original table to hold a fax number. Now, think about pagers, cell phones, conference call numbers, etc., and you can see how this would cause a lot of design work. If you have a separate table to hold phone information, you can add new phone numbers and new types of phone numbers with no programming. Some programmers disagree with this approach, saying that it makes it difficult to do a mail merge, print information on reports, etc. However, I solve this problem by simply having a checkbox on each phone record to signify whether it is the default phone number. You can do the same thing for addresses and ...