Right now I have a fairly well developed database and I'm looking for a better alternative for one specific field.

Currently I'm using one field inside each record where I type and keep track of assignment percentages.

ie;

Record 1

Percentage Assignment Field

John Doe 25%

Mary Two 25%

Mike Little 50%

All these names and percentages are in one field just typed out like shown. I'm sure there is a better way to do this.

A couple notes:

The names are rarely the same in each record.

The number of names can vary from 1 up to 10

The percentages obviously change per record

Any thoughts on how I might manage this info better is appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Why not put each name & percentage into seperated related records?

The thing is that the percentages and names HAVE TO show on the primary record to which they are assigned.

I'm not sure how I'd set that up. Let me know if you have a specific method in mind and how to execute it.

Thanks

My next question to you is how is the table / relationship where your records exist, set up? Maybe you can give some details on exactly what kind of table these names are going to be associated for...

Each record is a project. And to each record/project I wish to assign people certain percentages. The people are always different and projects are constantly being added in the form of a new record.

Hope that helps.

Ok then you definately want to make it more relational. You should create a new table that has all the users for each Project record. You can use a portal to display all the related people assigned to that project with their percentages.

You could create a separate table to keep track of the people that work on each project, and store the Person and the Percentage in that table. Create a relationship between the two tables, from Project to Percentages, and allow the creation of related records. Then put a portal on your main project screen that allows you to enter data into the Person and Percentage fields.

Even if you don't need the data that cleanly-organized right now, it's always good to have it in its own table, should you decide to do something more with the data at a later date. For example, if you wanted to do an analysis on a person-by-person basis, you cold create a Person table and link it to the Percentages table, to see how many projects that person has worked on and what their average is.

Anyhoo, perhaps more involved than you were looking for, but I threw together a quick solution to demonstrate the relationships. Hope it helps,

- Jeff

PROJECTS.zip

PROJECTS.zip