Osel - Help with Access

Although it is not essential to explicitly create relationships between tables, the process of creating relationships in the relationship window gives you a much better understanding of your table structures.

It also means that the relationship between the tables will be automatically recognized by the query builder, even if the related fields have different names (eg Customer_ID in the Invoice table and ID in the Customer table).

In the above example the Customer_ID field in the Invoice table is referred to as a Foreign Key field as it refers to the Primary Key Field in a foreign table. The index on a Foreign Key field should allow duplicates.

Access does not allow relationships between tables in different databases (at least not real ones) so if you have your tables in a backend database (and you should) then this is where you should create the relationships.

You should ensure that you have indexes on all Foreign Key fields as well as any field that will often be used for sorting or searching. For Example Customer_Name.