Hello -

Being new to FM7, but having used Access in the past (a long time ago!), I need a bit of help. I am creating a DB of contacts and Follow-up and I have so many fields that I decided to divide the fields in two, putting all the contact and sales info in one table, and all the historic and monetary info in another. Only now, while I can enter info in the main table, I cannot enter info in Table2. In both tables I put the field 'client name', which I have linked together. Obviously this is not enough. Can someone tell me in a very easy way how I am supposed to make this work?

Or should I never have divided the tables up? I seemed to recall in access that the DB slowed considerably with big tables and that it was better to divide....

Edited June 27, 200619 yr by Guest

The idea of dividing a solution into separate tables, each representing a distinct entity, is called 'normalizing'. It is a concept that is used accross different database systems. The advantage of normalizing the structure is that each bit of data is only stored in one place.

Your entities are not very clear, but you mention at least these four: Contact, Sale, Historic, and Monetary. I have no idea what "Historic" and "Monetary" are supposed to represent, and there could be other join tables in such a solution.

I'd suggest you read up on relational design, so you can recognize what constitutes an entity. Then as you're reading the FileMaker manual and help sites, you'll know what to look for. Also, there are numerous examples of Contact-Sales type solutions, including some demos within FMForums.

Thanks - I'm working in France and don't even have a FM reference book. My boss just sort of designated me IT girl, despite the lack of training. So am trying to get by on what I can figure out from reading the forums...

as a starting point think of the tables as spreadsheets and then decide how each of them are linked