Microsoft Access: Making Data Tables searchable

[elwesso]

Hello fellow PCMech people... have been a reader of your forum, and I really appreciate the valuable information contained on here.... please move this to another forum if I have posted incorrectly.

Here is my dilemma... I think what im trying to pull off should be simple but im making this too hard... I am trying to make a database searchable on multiple fields. I have all the data entered into the table...

This is a database of a bunch of car stuff. For instance, if I want to find out what engine a 1994 Infiniti Q45 ihas, all I have to do is type in the different search fields "1994 Infiniti Q45", and it brings up that it is the G50 chassis, has the VH45DE engine, and other related information.... Likewise, if I wanted to find what cars had the VH45DE engine, I could just type that into my search field, and it would bring up the Q45 among other cars...

Like I said, I have all the data compiled into one line per year.... So even though the 1990-1996 Q45 are all basically the same, they each have a seperate line in the table, i figured that would make it easier but i may have wasted time....

Right now I have a unique identifier to each line of data in the table.. Maybe it would be better to redo this to something else....

So here are my questions.

1. How can I go about making the database searchable on my criteria?? Eventually this will be used on the web.... I have heard

2. IS there anyway i can modify only certain sets of data....?? For instance, if I wanted to add information like what transmission or final drive the G50 series had, itd be nice if I could just tell the computer to apply the given information to all fields listed under the G50.

Thank you in advance for your assitance, it is greatly appreciated.

- Wes

[pam123]

I've never had to set up one, those who have pointed me here :

http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Flash...able-Database/

and here : http://astroa.physics.metu.edu.tr/MA.../database.html

These are basic tutorials on how it's done, having to do with setting up "flat files".

[mairving]

A goal in database design is to avoid database redundancy. So instead of having one table like say Cars you would have many tables. There are big problems when you only have one table. Say you have a column in your table called transmission. This column was a text field. If you have 100 different rows of cars in the table you would have 100 different transmissions. If one group of cars had the same transmission then you would have to change every row. You would also run into problems if you happened to mispell it one of those many times that you typed it in. If you did mispell it then it assumes a different value and totally throws off your database. So in this case you would have a table called cars and a table called transmission. The structure would be:
Cars Transmission
CarsID TransID
TransID TransDesc

So the cars table will link to the transmission table. You add or update the transmission in the transmission table and it's done.