copying data from one table to another

[gcooker]

What I am trying to do is to keep track of owners of a piece of hardware. I have a Customer table and a Machine table and then a Machine_history table. What I would like to do is copy some of the data (customer name, address, city, state, phone, job number) from the Customer and Machine tables to equal fields in the History Table (or combined into a few fields with a readable layout) I need to keep the relationship between the Job number in the History table and the Machine table. How can I do this? I have tried a few things but they don't seem to work.

Help

Thanks

[bruceR]

No, that is definitely not what you want to do.

You need to set up the relationships properly based on CustomerID and then DISPLAY the related fields on the layout.

[gcooker]

I don't want to keep the relationship as the customer may change (ownership may change) but I want to keep a history of who owned the machine. If a company goes out of bussiness they may get removed from the customer list but I sill want to keep a record that they owned the machine at one time. So It needs to be more like an audit log. Any Ideas?

[bruceR]

It is still not necessary to move the data. I don't know what you mean by machine history - is this ownership history or service history? Let's assume you need both; well then, you need tables for both. The Ownership table has a machineID, OwnerID, and date acquired.Perhaps some other info. The Service history would have the OwnerID at time of service, service date, etc. It really isn't necessary to delete the customers. But if you insist on deleting owners, then OwnerShip can use lookups to Customers to pull in the owner data.