Managing Relationships in Access 2000 by Using the Keyboard

One of the first things you want to do while designing your database is to divide your data into separate tables. Each table should contain information about only one subject, such as customers, orders, suppliers, and so forth. A table should not contain duplicate information, and information should not be duplicated between tables. The process of dividing your data into separate, related tables in order to minimize the duplication of information is called normalization.

There are several reasons for normalizing your data:

• When each piece of information is stored in one and only one location, you only need to update your data in one place. This makes it easier to update data, and also increases accuracy by eliminating the possibility that duplicate entries contain different information.
• Without redundant data, your database is smaller and data retrieval is faster.
• When each table contains facts about only one subject, you can maintain information about each subject independently from other subjects. For example, you would store customer addresses in a different table from the customers' orders, so that you could delete one order and still maintain the customer information.
• You can combine the data in a variety of ways.

For more information about normalizing your database, see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q209534 ACC2000: Database Normalization Basics

With your data in separate tables, you need a way to pull that data back together in order for it to be useful. The first step in this process is to define the relationships between the tables. After you've done that, you can create queries, forms, and reports to display information from several tables at once.