Microsoft® Access® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

14

Creating Lookup Tables

In Lesson 13 you learned how to create and use the value list and lookup fields in a table using Access 2010. In this lesson you learn how to create and use lookup tables, so that you can easily attach lookup fields to them. The uses of lookup tables are similar to the lookup fields Access makes available directly in a field of a table. However, the primary difference between the two is that lookup tables are used in most relational database systems, and as such make converting to other systems much easier, whereas the value list fields are a proprietary feature of Access and are not recognized by most other major database systems. Unlike the value list fields, all the data in a lookup field is contained in a separate table. This lesson discusses the basics of building lookup tables and attaching lookup fields to them.

LESSON SETUP

For this lesson you need Access 2010 installed and the Lesson 14 files from the book's website. You should be familiar with creating database objects and working with tables to complete this lesson successfully.

LOOKUP TABLE THEORY

Lookup tables are used to store data that is needed to support one or more fields in other tables. Examples of lookup tables include lists of cities, states, membership levels, ticker symbols, manufacturers, brand names, and many other types of data that might have other records related to them. Essentially, a lookup table is a list of unique values in one table that is used by fields in other tables ...